preposition of place at has similar meaning with di and pada, the preposition of place in has similar meaning with di and di dalam, and the preposition of place on
has similar meaning with di, di atas and pada. Indonesian learners often use the preposition of place at, in and on interchangeably since their meanings are almost
the same. However, they just may not use those prepositions at random. It is almost impossible in practices that the Indonesian learners will use preposition of
place at or on to interpret di dalam, in or at to interpret di atas, and in to interpret pada
. The most interchangeably uses which possibly occur are that the prepositions of place at, in and on are used to interpret di.
There are several difficulties faced by the L2 learner during their study. The factors that may lead the L2 learner faced the obstacles will be explained
below.
6. Possible Factors Causing Difficulty in Learning Preposition of Place at, in
and on
Brown 1987 elicits some factors that possibly cause the learners’ difficulty in learning second language, namely interlingual transfer, intralingual
transfer and context of learning. The clarification of each factor is as follows.
a. Inter-lingual Transfer
Dealing with transfer, Brown suggest that Transfer is general term describing the carryover previous performance or
knowledge to subsequent learning. Positive transfer occurs when the prior knowledge benefits the tasks-that is, when a previous item is correctly applied
to present subject matter. Negative transfer occurs when the previous performance disrupts the performance of the second task. The latter can be
referred to as interference…Brown, 1987:81.
Dulay et al., in the book language Two, also states the theories of interference and transfer. Interference has been used to refer to two very different
linguistic phenomena. The first one is essentially psychological and the other is essentially sociolinguistic. The psychological use of the term interference refers to
the influence of old habits when the new ones are being learned, whereas sociolinguistic use of the term interference refers to language interaction, such as
linguistic borrowing and language switching Dulay et al.,1978:98 . Weinrich defines interference as:
Those instances of deviations from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one
language, i. e., as a result of language in contact cited in Dulay et al., 1982:99 While Haugen defines linguistic borrowing as:
Borrowing is linguistic diffusion, and can be unambiguously defined as the attempt by a speaker to reproduce in one language, pattern which has learned
in another… it is the language of the learner that is influenced, not the language he learns cited in Dulay et al., 1982:99
Behavioural psychologist, who first defined ‘transfer’ technically, used it to refer to a process described as the automatic, uncontrolled, and subconscious
use of past learned behaviours in the attempt to produce new responses. In this sense transfer may be of two types: negative and positive. Negative transfer refers
to those instances of transfer which result in error because old, habitual behaviour is different from the new behaviour that is being learned. In contrast, positive
transfer results in correct performances because new behaviour is the same as the
old. Both types of transfers refer to the automatic and subconscious use of old behaviour in new learning situations Dulay et al., 1982: 101.
Though they are a lot of people who learn a second language every year, only very few succeed in mastering it. The most obvious reason is that a learner of
a second language has had experience with another language. Another reason is there are some factors determine the type and degree of second language learning.
Those factors can be linguistic, social and psychological. It has been common in second language teaching to stress the linguistic influence. Linguistically the
process in second language learning depends on 1 how the second language differs from the first, and 2 how much the first language interferes with the
second Mackey, 1961: 107-8. It is of course not surprising that this process has been emerged, because native language interference is surely the most
immediately noticeable source of errors for the second language learners. It is clear from learning theory is that a person will use whatever previous experience
he or she has had with language in order to facilitate the second language process. The native speaker has acquired an obvious set of prior experience. Sometimes the
native language is negatively transferred, and we say then interference has occurred Brown, 1987: 87. For example, related to this study, the Indonesian
prepositions of place di, di atas, di dalam and pada uses have, in this case, interfered with the person’s production of a correct English form. Unfortunately
the Indonesian learners lack positive transfer so that there are many negative transfers especially concerning with prepositions of place at, in and on.
Beyond the interference there are still many factors which influence the probability of occurrence of interference phenomena Els et al., 1884: 59-60:
1 Amount and nature of input: interference is especially likely occurs when
the L2 input is limited in quantity and scope. This situation occurs mainly where L2 is learned in an L1 environment e.g. schools; most studies showing
a limited role of interference focus on learning L2 in an L2 environment, where L2 input is abundant and varied;
2 Level of linguistic analysis: more L2 learning research has been done at the
level of morphology and syntax than at the phonological and lexical levels;
3 Linguistic distance between L1 and L2: interference phenomena manifest
themselves especially strongly between related linguistic system: the degree of interference is partly determined by the degree of ‘translability’ of L1 feature
into L2 feature;
4 L2 learning stage: there is some evidence that, for adult learner at least,
interference phenomena are most frequent in the first stage of L2 learning process;
5 Task focus: if the focus of L2 use is on correct grammatical form rather than
on communicative effectiveness, interference is likely to occur: written translation task under time pressure constitute extremely favourable conditions
for the occurrence of interference phenomena.
b. Intra-lingual Transfer
