58 tongue, overgeneralization and the context of learning. Thus, the discussion of
those three possible causes will be presented in the three subsections below:
1. Interferences from the Mother Tongue
There are several errors which show the interferences from Bahasa Indonesia. However, here the researcher will only discuss two of them. They are
the omission of the plural marker –s and alternating form. First, to indicate plural nouns, the students should add the plural marker to some English nouns which
need it. However, the students often omitted the plural marker –s, which functions as a marker of plural nouns, for example
There are three goat.
This error might have occurred because the students applied Bahasa Indonesia’s rule while writing
English noun phrases. In Bahasa Indonesia, reduplication is sometimes made to indicate plurality
and plurality is mostly indicated by adding quantifiers before nouns. However, a word can also be plural without adding any words to indicate plurality. Those
rules show that Bahasa Indonesia is not consistent in applying plural form. The use of plural forms depends on the meaning of the sentence. On the contrary,
almost all English plural nouns do need an additional plural marker to indicate plural nouns, for example, adding quantifiers before nouns and adding plural
marker -s, -es, -ies, etc in the final regular countable nouns. Thus, interference from the mother tongue accounts for the omission of the plural marker -s because
they are accustomed to applying Indonesian plural noun forms and have low awareness of the need for the plural marker –s for plural nouns.
59 The other interference from the mother tongue is alternating form,
regarding the use of demonstratives. The students also made a few errors in demonstratives. They used them interchangeably, take for instance, that chickens
is have white and black color
which should be written those chickens because chickens is plural. Similarly, Bahasa Indonesia has pronomina penunjuk atributif
which have almost the same function as demonstratives. However, Bahasa Indonesia does not differentiate pronomina penunjuk atributif based on
countability. Indonesian uses itu which means that and those, and ini which means this and these for both singular and plural nouns. Thus, it is possible that the
students made errors forming demonstratives because they were still confused about the two different concepts.
To sum up, the interferences from the mother tongue really become the possible cause of the errors. Thus, it is important to clearly explain the differences
and similarities of noun phrases in Bahasa Indonesia and English before further explaining both basic noun phrases and complex noun phrases.
2. Overgeneralization
