CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION AN ANALYSIS ON ERRORS MADE BY LEARNERS IN FORMING IRREGULAR PLURAL NOUNS
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stated by Harmer “… what they know about grammar they may remember the lesson from school, but beyond that they will say that they have forgotten what
grammar they once knew.”
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The structures in English language involve a number of grammatical rules including the regular and irregular forms of words where students are expected to
understand but unfortunately, they find this an uneasy thing to do. One of the examples is when they feel quite difficult in distinguishing the regular and
irregular forms of plural nouns. The difference between English and Indonesian structures of words
writing does confuse many students in learning it, especially for the noun words that are not only in form of singular and plural, but also in form of regular and
irregular. Some of the nouns are the same in forms whether they are in plural or singular, while some others are in different forms. W
e can say in English „a deer‟ and „many deer‟ not „many deers‟ as it is in the same form and belongs to
irregular noun form. In Indonesian, we just easily can say: seekor rusa or banyak rusa without any inflectional changes. Another example is the noun word a
horse which is singular and thus becomes horses in plural, and this belongs to regular noun word, as the pattern is simply by asserting an s at the end of the
singular noun word. Those grammatical rules in forming the plural nouns are perplexed by a
number of other exceptional patterns. We take examples the noun words mouse that changes into mice, not mouses, and goose that becomes geese, not gooses,
from their singular forms into their plural ones, respectively. Their specific ways in changing from singular to plural classify them into what we call as the irregular
nouns and thus become an exception in which many students experience a number of errors. This phenomenon urges the writer to learn more the causes or reasons
within, and thus made him conduct a research which is titled “An Analysis on
Errors Made by Learners in Forming Irregular Plural Nouns”.
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Harmer, Jeremy. The Practice of English Language Teaching, 1991, New York: Longman Publishing, p.12-13
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