The present work is a study of the ‘native language influence’ and other factors underlying Indonesian EFL learners’ production of English tenses; hence it covers not only the constrastive study between L1 and L2 in the ‘transfer analysis’ advocated by Lado (1957), but also the study of other factors outside the native language Indonesian thet influence learners’ production of correct and incorrect tense. The analyses of negative transfer of Indonesian in the language of Indonesian EFL learners have been done in many researches, such as in the use of English spatial preposition (Mudjijono 2001), syntax (Nugraho 2002), and parts of speech (Pramujuwono 2010). They commonly focus only on errors and the negative influence of the native language Indonesian as popularly called the interference from L1 into L2. Not enough attention has been paid to non-errors as well as to any other linguistic factors that might influence the production of the target language by learners. This present work, a study of the use of English tenses by Indonesian learners, extends the line of research by studying not only errors but also non-errors. In addition, the investigation in this study covers not only the influence of the native language Indonesian but also the influence of the other factors underlying learners’ production of correct and incorrect tense.
Errors and non-errors of tense in thirty six short texts written by first graduate university students are collected. All of the subjects speak Indonesian as their mother tongue and few of them are bilingual with their regional language spoken at home. Based on interview with learners, errors as well as non-errors are analyzed to find the influencing factor underlies learners’ choice of tenses. The findings show four influencing factors. Two factors are triggers for errors in Indonesian learners’ production of tense, i.e., the influence from the native language Indonesian and learners’ confusion. One factor facilitates learning and lead learners to the production of correct tenses, i.e., the occurrence of certain English time signals. Another factor trggers errors in past tenses but facilitates learning in present tenses, i.e., the lexical bundles or language chunks. |