perfect. According to Brown 1980: 173-174 there are three basic sources of a learner’s producing errors in learning a new language. These general sources of
errors consist of interlingual transfer or interference, intralingual or developmental errors and context of learning.
1. Interference of the Mother Tongue
Interference of the mother tongue is defined as the process of the influence of the learners’ mother tongue to the production in the target language. The
students who have not yet mastered the target language often make some errors in grammatical and lexical collocation because of the interference of their mother
tongue to the students’ sentence productions, which were the same as their mother tongue. e.g:
..there was an active bomb at one of the White House room. She did not want to cut their relationship
Shanty told everything that had happened with her … …Uci used the opportunity
From the sentences above, if they are translated into Bahasa Indonesia they will be:
…ada sebuah bomb yg aktif di salah satu ruangan White House Dia tidak ingin memustuskan hubungan mereka.
Shanty memberitahu semua yang telah terjadi padanya… … Uci menggunakan kesempatan itu.
In the first sentence, the student used wrong preposition at instead of in because in Bahasa Indonesia both the preposition at and in mean di. In fact in
English the preposition at is usually used to indicate place. Therefore, the student might get confused which preposition should he used. In the second sentence, the
word cut means memutuskan. It cannot be used in this sentence because cut cannot collocate with relationship. It means the student took the Indonesian
transfer and just translated it word by word without considering the appropriate partnership of the word. In the third sentence, the student applied word
partnership in Indonesian. In Indonesian the word terjadi usually collo cates with the word pada. But, the student put the wrong preposition with. In the last
example, the student also applied the word partnership in Indonesian that is menggunakan kesempatan
. In fact, in English the word use cannot collocate with the word opportunity. The appropriate collocation is took the opportunity. From
the four examples above, it is clear that Indonesian influences the student in producing incorrect collocation in English.
1. Intralingual or Developmental Error
