40
Figure 4.3 Sample of Errors Identified in the Writings
Addition errors also found in some writings, especially in form of double marking. The writers double the past form or marks in certain sentences. For
example the one that is made by P2: I used to woke up late every day.
P2 understands that past form is used to every event or action that happenned and done in the past. Yet, he doubled the mark of past form itself without consider
other rule of forming a habitual past sentence. This is clarified by his personal interview as follows:
Pemahaman mengenai penggunaan past tense itu yang tahu adalah bahwa sesudah berlalu, walaupun sedetik yang lalu, itu menggunakan past tense.
Dan kalau ada –ed berarti itu waktunya sudah lewat. Jadi indikasinya ya
itu. Pokonya asal ada tanda bentuk past, nah bagi saya itu sudah benar. I understand that we use past form for every thing that had happened in
the past, even if it is just a second ago. The –ed form indicates the past. As
long as I have the past form in a sentence, I consider it as right —form of a
past PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
41 Six out of ten made the same error double marking. This clarifies that generally,
these learners might have same concept of what P2 has. As they understand that past
is applied in event or action happened and done in the past, other rules are not taken into account.
Archi-form misformation is significantly found in these writings. All the learners produced this type of error. For example the one that done by P9:
When the words were saying, I should think about the meaning. Vaguely, the sentence above is grammatically correct. But, in the context of the
writing, P9 misformed the phrase were saying. From the previous paragraph we know that he is telling about his difficulties of understanding a new vocabulary in
English topic: Learning Strategy. He is trying to say that when a new word is saying, he needs to think first to find the meaning. Yet, he ends up with producing
the sentence above in past form. Although the fact that he is talking about is still happening until now. That is why his phrase above considered as an error in
misformation. Other archi-form error also done by P1 as follows: Have you ever find yourself in front of a strong block and it seemed you
are going to give up?
This sentence is considered as an imparralel because the writer misformed the first clause. He should mark both clauses with same tense past tense.
Regularization errors found also in some of these writings. Yet, the intensity of its occurance is much less than archi-form errors that found. As an
example, regularization errors found in P2‘s writing. He wrote, When I am watching this movie, ...
42 Actually, he is explaining what he had been feeling during the video watching.
Yet, he misform the to be as present instead of a past. In personal interview he claims that he is still confused in using past tense. Although he knows the rule and
understands the concept, he sometimes still produce sentence like the one above even again and again.
Pemahaman mengenai penggunaan past tense itu yang saya tahu adalah bahwa sesudah berlalu, walaupun sedetik yang lalu, itu menggunakan
past tense. Dan kalau ada –ed berarti itu waktunya sudah lewat. Jadi
indikasinya ya itu. Pokonya asal ada tanda bentuk past, nah bagi saya itu sudah benar. Tapi dalam aplikasinya, kecenderungan menggunakan
present. Tensenya, menggunakan present.
I understand that we use past form for every thing that had happened in the past, even if it is just a second ago. The
–ed form indicates the past. As long as I have the past form in a sentence, I consider it as right
—form of a past. But in its practice, I still tend to use present
As the result, the most regular error made by the students is archi-form misformation. Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1981 defines archi-form
misformation is an error made by the learner in using form. Further, why do these students mostly made archi-form error in their writings would be elaborated
in the following sub chapter.
3. Learners’ Personal Narratives
In order to answer the second research question, this section presents the result of interview done by the researcher toward three students in Bahasa Inggris
I class B. Ellis 2005 states that errors involve determining their sources in order
to account for why those errors were made. Knowing the reasons of why the students make errors is considered as an important part in SLA research. In this
research, then the researcher interviewed three of ten students related to their PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
43 personal narratives in learning English especially in mastering the concept and the
use of past tense. Beside to find out why do they make errors in their writings, the researcher also want to draw some clarification to the description of these
students‘ writings. These three interviewees are P1, P2 and P9. There is a reason why the
reseacher chose these three students out of ten subjects here in this study. These three students‘ writing descriptions represent each general division in terms of
their points. P1 achieves the highest score among all. He performs as the best compared to the other nine in terms of accuracy, content, organization and diction
see Chart 4.1 . Therefore the researcher considers
P1‘s level as best. While P9 represents those who achieve lower points in accuracy especially, and also
content, as well as the organization and diction see Chart 4.1. Yet, P9‘s errors
are much less found in using of past tense. The errors commonly found are related to other elements of English preposition, subject-verb agreement, etc. So he
performs fairly good in term of past tense. The researcher considers P9‘s level as
good. P2 represents those who achieves lower points in accuracy, and the error
analysis result confirms that P2 produces fairly lot of errors in past tense. The researcher considers
P2‘s level as poor. By having the representative of each level, the researcher expects a fairly result to clarify their performance in writing,
especially here in this study. That is why these three subjects then were picked up to be interviewed.
There are some sources of error explained by Brown 1980 namely interlingual transfer, intralingual factors and context of learning. While Corder
44 1973 proposes the similar concept. He explains there are four factors that give
impact to a learner in making errors while learning language namely mother tongue, basis analogy, nature of teaching and teaching materials. The questions
that have been asked to the interviewee are to clarify it. First of all, the interviewees were asked about when they learned English
for the first time. P1 states that he learned English for the first time when he was in fourth grade of Elementary school. English lesson that he received at that time
was a formal English since it was taught at school. The other interviewee, P2 experienced the same. He managed to know English when he was in fourth grade
of Elementary school. Interestingly, both P1 and P2 claim that they got additional class for English in the same time fourth grade of Elemntary school.
P2: Pertama kali belajar bahasa Inggris itu SD kelas empat kalau tidak salah e, tapi itu bukan formal.
I: Berarti kursus? P2: Kursus, iyah kursus. Kursus tapi itu cuman berapa bulan e, tiga
bulan, dua kali pertemuan tiga bulan, setelah itu saya off. Membosankan..membosankan.
P2: I learned English for the first time when I was in the fourth grade of Elementary school but it was not the formal one.
I: Was it an English course that you join? P2: Yes, it was an English course. But, it was just for about moreless three
months with two meetings each month if I‘ve not mistaken, then I quited. It was very boring for me.
Yet, different from P2, P1 did not quit that early. He finished his English course
until he was in sixth grade of Elementary school. P1 claims that he even had learned about past tense
–and other tenses in that English course program. P1: Eeh, di sekolah ada bahasa Inggris, red. Terus gue dapat tambahan.
I: Nah itu maksudnya. Berarti frater les-lesan bahasa Inggris gitu pas SD? P1: Iya. Tapi bener kan, pas SD kelas 4 itu gua udah dapat pelajaran
yang namanya bahasa Inggris. Cuman kalau past tense ya di les-lesan itu. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
45
P1: Eeh, I got English at school. But also I got additional English lesson. I: Yes, that is what I mean. So you learned English when you were in
Elementary school right? P1: Yes. I got English lesson when I was in the fourth grade of Elementary
school. But for past tense specifically, I learned it in that course
—English course
While P9, because he was born in other country and just moved to Indonesia when he was around 14 years old, he managed to know English little bit
later than the other two. Beside that his experience with English was not interesting. He claims that the teacher used to ask them to memorize the English
words. P9 said: saya mulai kenal bahasa Inggris waktu masih SMP kelas 1. Dan aah, saya
dapat bahasa Inggris, saat itu memang ya saya menganggap bahasa Inggris ini kan satu pelajaran yang tidak terlalu apa juga untuk saya
karena belum ada orientasi ke depan seperti apa. Jadi semacam hanya ikut dinamika bahasa Inggris, kelas bahasa Inggris. Dan, yaah, belum
belajar, waktu itu yang pertama kali belajar bahasa Inggris itu adalah untuk vocabulary, kata-katanya walaupun sampai sekarang tidak hafal-
hafal juga tertawa. Itu mulai kenal bahasa Inggris mulai kenal seperti ini, kata-katanya seperti ini terus , ehh, kalau mau tau banyak harus hafal
kata-kata disuruh guru untuk hafal kata-kata saat SMP itu. Dan pengalaman pertama memang, belajar bahasa Inggris itu sesuatu yang
menurut saya sulit ya, untuk lebih bisa pahami lebih dalam lagi mengenai bahasa Inggris yang bisa dipraktekan.
I managed to learn English for the very first time when I was in the first grade of Junior
High School. And for me personally, at that time, I didn‘t consider English as an important subject because I didn‘t have any
orientation for my future. So, at that time, I just follow the lesson and the activities in the class without really be involved. The first thing about
English that I learned was vocabularies. Even though until now, I still have lack of vocabularies laugh.
That‘s how I know English for the first time. At that time, our teacher always ask us to memorize those vocabularies.
Which for me, as the first experience with English, it became very difficult. Moreover how to understand and than apply it Eng.
46 P2 and P9 have similar case in term of mother tongue. P9 was born in
Timor Leste and raised there until he was around 14 years old. Therefore, he speaks Tetun local language. But, he explains that Tetun itself has various type
namely Tetun Terik and Tetun Portu. Tetun Terik mostly adapts many words from Indonesia to be used while Tetun Portu mostly adapts many other words from
Portugesee. P9 used to speak those two types of Tetun. As he explains: Bahasa ibu saya bahasa Tetun. Hhm. Bahasa Tetun. Setelah itu saya
masuk eeh, SD, itu saya dibawa ke Timor Leste dan Tetun saya itu Tetun, eehh, campuran. Saya dari Tetun yang Terik ke daerah yang Tetun Portu,
mau tidak mau saya harus, ehh, beda lagi. Saya harus menyesuaikan dengan Tetun Terik saya dengan Tetun, eeh, Portu.
I spoke Tetun as my first language. After I entered Elementary school, I was taken to live in Timor Leste. Therefore I started to speak mix-Tetun
Terik
and Portu Both of them are different so at that time I had to adapt.
While P2 speaks bahasa Adonara East of Flores‘ local language. He also
has various type of bahasa Adonara. For its variety of dialects and some lexical or morphemes as he explains:
Bahasa daerah bahasa pertama saya. ... Baru saya kan basicnya, bahasa L1 kan ada beberapa bahasa memang, jadi ehm, bahasa ibu ada
beberapa bahasa, ada bahasa dialek Flores Adonara-Adonara Barat, kemudian Flores Adonara Timur, dan Adonara tengah. Itu kan,
maksudnya masing-masing punya dialek yang berbeda. Ya, saya gunakan. Ketika berbicara dengan orang Adonara Barat, ya, sambung, kemudian
Adonara Timur juga harus menyesuaikan dengan mereka. My first language is our local language. Basically our local language is
different one another even compared among disctrict. The dialects are different. For example, the one that I used to speak at home is bahasa
Adonara-Barat,
then also bahasa Adonara-Timur and bahasa Adonara Tengah.
Each of them, based on the location, has its own dialect and I used to use all of them depend on whom I speak with
