From my experience in teaching English at a University, I develop the feeling that Indonesians, even at the advanced level, still make errors when it comes to relating the verb and its object. For example, even at an advanced level students or pehaps even University lecturers make errors such as do a research instead of the right collocation conduct research. So, I began curious why such errors occur. There must be reasons for these errors. I believe that the reason lie in the way that these students mentally process the relationship between these two elements. In other words, I believe that there is a psycholinguistic reason for these.
In order to find the answer, I designed three types of questionnaires which I call Version 1, Version 2, and Version 3. Each Version consists of 20 items. In version 1, all the nouns accur immediately after the verbs and all are active sentences. In ersion 2 the nouns are separated from the verbs by words or phrases and the sentences are also active sentences. In version 3, the nouns are separated from the verbs and the sentences are passive. The questionnaires were given to 40 second semester students of Darma Persada University.
The thesis is to investigate not the errors that they make, but why they make errors the way they do. In addition to that, I suspect that the longer the nouns separated from the verbs, the more difficult they are : and the most difficult will be in passive construction.
From the analysis of the data, it was found the following :
1. Some of the errors can be attributed to transfer from L1 to L2
2. Some others can be clearly seen that errors re based on the similarities of the semantic features in the same semantic field
3. There is a small number of answer that seem to be based on mere ignorance
4. It is indeed true that the longer the verb is separated from the object noun, the more errors the students make
5. The most common errors are found when the verbs and the nouns are separated by words or phrases in passive construction
6. No students chose the Verbs which are semantically far apart.The irrespective of the type of errors, it was found that the underlying reasons can be psycholinguistically explained. Even in the case of transfer, for instances, this phenomenon is also observed. |