D. The Possible Causes of the Students’ Difficulties in Mastering Preposition of
Place at, in and on
This section discusses the possible causes of the students’ difficulties in mastering the preposition of place at, in, and on. The teachers and the students
themselves should pay attention to these difficulties since they are probably the sources of errors. From the analysis above, the possible sources of errors in this study
are identified as inter-lingual, intra-lingual transfer and the context of learning. Intra- lingual transfer itself occurs when the learner creates a deviant structure on the basis
of his experience of other structure in the target language overgeneralization, when the learner fails to observe the restriction of structure in the target language
ignorance of rule restriction, and in learners’ structure whose deviation represent the degree of development of the rules required to produce acceptable utterances
incomplete application of rules, while developmental errors derive from faulty comprehension of distinction in the target language false concept hypothesized
Richards, 1974: 174-8. The context of learning is dealing with the students, the teachers, and the materials it selves. The following are the detailed discussion on
those possible causes of errors.
1. Inter-lingual Transfer .
Sometimes the meanings of the preposition of place at, in and on are overlapping one to another. This circumstance may cause difficulties to the students.
This condition could have been even worst since there were interference of the L1. In a daily conversation, all of the preposition of place in Bahasa Indonesia di,di dalam,
di atas and pada can be replaced as di. This habit of the overlapping meaning in
Bahasa Indonesian was negatively transferred into their target language L2. Meanwhile, in English, the preposition of place at, in and on cannot replace one to
another. It is also possible that the students borrowing the language pattern from their mother tongue L1 to produce their utterances in L2.
2. Intra-lingual Transfer
It is obvious that from the analysis above, the students still lack of knowledge about the rules underlying the preposition of place at, in and on. Each preposition of
place has its own rule underlying its form. Since the rules underlying it are complex, it may cause problems to the students. Its complexity leads the students to make
overgeneralization to the rules. Students also may have their own construction in their mind when they are
producing the L2. They probably acquired this from their previous learning, poor gradation of teaching items and emphasizing memorization of rules rather than
understand them. This kind of phenomena is known as the false concept hypothesized.
3. The Context of Learning
The word context refers to the factors outside the learners; it could be from the textbook, the teachers or lecturers and even the classroom. In this study, the
textbook plays role in causing the students difficulties in their attempt to master the prepositions of place at, in and on. Most of the textbooks used in their teaching
learning process do not discuss the prepositions of place at, in and on in detail. It only shows a brief explanation.
This condition goes worst since the syllabus of the first semester students of English Language Education Program only include the subject in two hour meetings.
This time allocation is not enough to discuss the prepositions of place at, in and on in detail. Though their achievement in this study was moderate, the fact that they still do
not master the prepositions of place at, in and on is intriguing.
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CHAPTER V CONCLUSION, IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMENDATIONS
In this chapter, the conclusions that been drawn from research result and the data analyses are to be presented. Next, the suggestions, as the feedback of this study
are proposed. The proposed suggestions are dedicated to the learners, the lecturers and to the further researches.
A. Conclusions
The first semester students’ of English Language Education Program of Sanata Dharma University mastery on the prepositions of place at, in and on, was
considered good according to the academic regulation of Sanata Dharma University. Their average score mean was 28.68 57.36, which entered category of
sufficient. Based on the result of the research, the difficulties that the students had in
mastering the prepositions of place at, in and on was in the preposition of place at. The students only achieve 54.65 of correct answer in the whole test. According to
the academic regulation of Sanata Dharma University, their achievement was low and unsatisfactory. Their achievement in the preposition of at was far below the minimum
standard of mastery 56. The difficulties that they had were resulted from three major possible sources. The first was the interference from the mother tongue
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