The objective of this study is to find out the order of morphemes acquired by young native Indonesian speakers who are learning English as foreign language. Besides, this study is designed to discover the difficult morphemes that Indonesian young EFL learners try to acquire. English consists of several known morphemes such as auxiliaries, articles,
regular and irregular past, progressives, possessives, third person singulars and more. According to Krashen’s natural order hypothesis, children who are learning English as L1, acquire these morphemes in certain order. However, in the case of children learning English as a second or foreign language, the order of those morphemes acquired may or may not resemble Krashen’s natural order. In this study, the data was obtained by instructing 12 young Indonesian EFL learners to write an expository essay based on the sequenced pictures given. This research focuses on several morphemes such as auxiliaries, articles, regular past, irregular
past, and possessive ‘s’. The morphemes that ocurred more frequently indicated that morphemes acquired earlier than others and vice versa. However, the results showed that the order of morphemes learned by young Indonesian EFL learners are not the same compared to the order predicted by Krashen’s natural order hypothesis. |