Research in Elt

THE INTERFERENCE OF MOTHER TONGUE IN STUDENTS’ LANGUAGE LEARNING
A PAPER
Submitted as a Partial Fulfilment in Seminar on language Teaching

Lecture: Dr. Hermayawati, M.Pd

By:
Titis Wisnu Wijaya
07004114
B CLASS

ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM
THE FACULTY OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION
AHMAD DAHLAN UNIVERSITY
YOGYAKARTA
2010
INTRODUCTION
English which is an international language is used for communication in many countries around the world especially in the globalization era when technology and communication grow rapidly. The communication bacomes the the most important thing to convey the message, the information, the knowledge, etc. In addition, there are a lot of news and information, that are writen and brodcasted in english. This fact demands everyone to master english. English mastery becomes the main need to face the globalization era. According to lado (1977:9) proficiency in the target language includes the four skills: listening, reading, writing and speaking. Learning english should involve four skill: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. We should also learn the language component which supports the mastery of four language skills. The language component are pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Brown (1987:154) states teaching the english language generally means teaching the four skills namly listening, reading, writing and speaking, and language component, namely pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. The goal oflearning a lnaguage including english is that we can communicate writely and spoken using english. As the goverment instruct to the education institution includingschool, universityand informal education institutions, in evey english language teaching, it is expected for students to have abilities to communicate using english actively to face the globalization era. In other words students are expected not only to understandenglish but also use english for communication. However in fact the students have difficulties to speak english or they can speak english but with incorrect pronunciation and there are many difficulties and error for students, because speaking is a matter habit so if they wants to learn a foreign language the students will abviously meet all kinds of learning problems. In this paper the writer will explain some problems of mother tongue. The first problem is there is contrastive analysis between mother tongue and second language including english language. The analysis is quite enough to show that the mother tongue has big influence in learning english speakingfor students. Preoccupation of linguists and applied linguist. The errors and difficulties that occur in students learning and use of a foreign language are caused by interference of mother tonguewherever the structure of foreign language differs from that of the mother tongue we can expect in learning and error in performance. The second is fact of mother tongue interference, the students problems are caused by the interferrence of mother tongue.there are some aspect of language that interference by the mother tongue. First aspect is morphology that study of field of words. This knowledge is clossely related to grammatika, second aspect is syntactic. Syntactic is study about relation accompany of words and accompany group of words (or accompany of phrase) name in the basic of syntactic is sentence, and the third aspect is phonetic and phonology. The both system have affinity. katamba (1989) to formulate that “phonology is the branch of linguistics, which investigates the ways in which sounds are used systematically in different languages to form words and utterence”this knowledge are study of sound system that called phones or speech sounds. Students come from the different areas that have differents sounds system with the second language including english. The students will meet difficulties in their learning process may be easily understood because since childhood they have been speaking their mother tongue, their speech organs have been set to produce the speech sounds of their own language. In theis treatment we will focus our attention only on the problems concerned with pronunciation. There are three reason for pronunciation problems such as: the different elements in sound system between the native and the foreign language that not consistent, another learning problems may be caused by sounds which have the same phonetic features in both language but differ in their distribution, the last the similar sounds in the two language which have different variant or allophones. Last problem is how the students learn a foreign language. We know very little of psychology (emotional, memory, process, order) of learning. Teaching methode have been largely the collected practice and teaching habits of paticular teachers who reacted to the memory of their own experience in learning, the example of their own teachers, and the fashion which seemed prevalent or attractive at a particular moment in the history of languge teaching. From the above there are many problems from students and teachers to learn and teach the second language that are caused by interferference of mother tongue such as:(1) what is the contrastive analysis between mother tongue and language teaching?(2)what is error analysis?(3) What the fact of mother tongue interference?(4) And the last is how the students learn a foreign languge? The objective at the study in this research as follows: (1) to understand what is the contrastive analysis?(2) to explain the error analysis (3) to undestand the fact of mother tongue interference? ( 4)to be able to learn foreign language. Mother tongue is the basic language to there are many difficulties and error to master the english language but it can be anticipated although it can not correct pronunciation bacause speaking is a matter of habit. This paper can be useful for the reader because in this paper there are some solution for teachers or students that have learning foreign language to easily the learner to face the several of students area. For the writer this paper is very important to finish their task, beside that with write about mother tongue interference the writer have many knowledge and have solution to master the foreign languge and not stubborn in face the error and difficulties that caused by interference of mother tongue. The significant at the study in this research is as follows: (1) for the teachers, the writer hopes that the result of the study can be reference for english teachers. It can be a good guide forr the teachers to teach their students correctly especially in teacing english language in general(or in four skill such as speaking, writing, reading and listening).(2) for the students are to be able to know how to learn english language fluently and pronounciation in correctly and avoid the error. (3) for the writer, the result of this research will give some useful knowledge and experiences for her in learning and improving english. (4) for the other writer it may offer some information to other researchers who are interested to research the similar topics to carry out further studies on the interference of mother tongue.

DISCUSSION A. Contrastive analysis This evidence is quite enough to show how widespread influence of the mother tongue is. As evidence it is not new. Most the examples a have citied will long have been familiar to practicing teachers. What is new is the recognition of the extent of the phenomena and the effort that has been made to make systematike use of this information in language teaching. A significant proportion of language learning theory has been based upon evidence of the sort that i have presented. A whole field of interest, usually called contrastive analysis has gown up and become a major preocupation of linguist and applied linguist. For many people aplied linguistic is contrastive analysis. It has been set up for comparative study of languages with the justification that the result will prove significant and valuable for language teaching. The errors and difficulties that occur in learning and use of foreign language are caused by the interference of the mother tongue. Wherever the structure of the foreign language differs from that of the mother tongue we can expect both difficulty in lerning and error in performance where the structure of the two language are the same, no difficulty, it can be anticipate and teaching is not necessary. Teaching will be influenceby the point of where there are structural differences. The difficulties will emerge from the various group of people learning, say. English as a foreign language will change according to their mother tongue, and since teaching is to be directed at the differences between languages, if a comparative study ~ a contrastive analysis ~ of the target language and the mother tongue is carried out, the differences between the language can be discovered and it becomes possible to predict the difficulties that the learners will have. It is determined what the learner and teachers must balance to make easier in study. As a teacher do not stubborn in face the error and difficulties that caused by interference of mother tongue. There are many teachers that not understand about the theory of linguistics so that they often stubborn in teaching a language. A wealth of telling practical experience, often without theoretical pretence or an in – depth understanding of the long history behind the topic. Alternatively we can look at a case involving a language lecturer at York University, who is inspiring everybody with her 50 participant strong Italian course: “she’s breaking every rule there is. She translates everything as she goes along, she mixes in a lot of grammar, and she has students parroting phrases and answer”. (Times educational supplement,(3october 1975) B. Error analysis error analysis was an alternative to contrastive analysis, an approach influenced by behaviourism through which applied linguist sought to use the formal distinctions between the learners first and second language to predict error. Error can be classified according to basic type: omisive, substitutive or related to word order, and so on. Error in learning second language are very complects depend on the learner how they can solve their error in learning. Because the error can also classified to according to the feel of language: phonological errors, vocabulary errors or lexical errors. Syntactic error and so on. They may be assessed according to the degree to which they interefere with communication: global error make an utterance difficult to understand, while error do not. In the above example, “ I angry” would be local error, since the meaning apparent. From the beginning error analysis was beset with methodological problem. In particular, the above typologies are problematic: from linguistic data alone, it is often impossible to reliably determine what kind of error a learner making. Also, error analysis can be deal effectively only with learner production (speaking and writing) and not with learner reception (listening and reading). Furthermore, it canot account for learner use of communicative strategies such a evidence, which learner simply do not use form with which they are uncomfortable. For these reasons, although error analysis is still used to investigate specific question in second language, the quest for an overacting theory of learner errors has largely been abandoned. There are some significant of error in learning English language as follows: ➢ In general when the native language of the students has more phonemic distinctions in a phonetic area then the foreign language, he find little difficulty adjusting, to the simpler phonemic pattern. Even when transferred to the foreign language they do not produce phonemic problems but merely distortion that gives their speech a foreign flavour but not different linguistic meaning. ➢ In general when the student goes from a simpler phonemic system to a more complex one he has difficulty producing and hearing the distinction that constitutes greater complexity. ➢ in matters of significant items of word order, function word, and correlation of forms the students will transfer the form of his native language with its meaning to the foreign language. For example, if the native language of the students indicate a modifier by position after the head in a modification structure, and the foreign language indicates this type of modifier by position after the head in a modification structure, and the foreign language indicates this type of modifier by a position before the head, the students will have persistent difficulty placing the modifier before the head as he does habitually in his native language. In listening and reading he will take as head what is modifier and as modifier what is head. If he is Spanish speaker he may understand milk chocolate to be a kind of milk and chocolate milk to be a kind of chocolate, instead of the opposite, which is their sense in English. ➢ Corollary. Learning the problems, that is, the structural matters that differ between the two languages, is learning the foreign language. Actually they are transferred from the native language and since they function satisfactorily they do not have to be learned anew.

C. Fact of mother tongue interference Language is a system, it means that language has certain rules that are learned and used by human when they are speaking or writing. Some of the rules can be seen in phonology. On phonology we know that only certain sound system can be used in a language. If there were no system in a language, there would not be a language. We can learn a language because it has the system. A foreign language students will meet with difficulties in their learning process may be easily understood. Since childhood he has been speaking his mother tongue, which has been explanted in him as part of his habits. There are some aspects of language that are interference by mother tongue those are:
1. Morphology Morphology is closely related to grammatical, it is absolute case because every words can be segmented to parts of words, its’ name is phoneme, but that phonemes does not must in the form of morpheme. For example in the word “Lombok” it has six phonemes that are /L/, /O/, /M/, /B/, /O/, /K/ that constitute only one morpheme. Beside that words can consist of two morphemes like “sleeps” in English language. In “sleeps” word there are two morphemes those are “sleep and s” in Javanese language “e” in “anake” “anakntya” is constitute morpheme and so it is with England language “t” is constitute morpheme in “er loopt” (ia) berjalan or er lauft in germane language.
2. Syntactic It is discuss all that are connection between the words and between the group of words (or between the phrase) in the one syntactic basic is sentence, object and adverb and so on. There are some problems need to explain like function of object that often divided into direct object and indirect object. For example in English sentence “I gave her the book” so “her” is an indirect object and “the book” as direct object. The constituent of “her” can be used as (filler) of subject passive in the sentence, so that sentence will be a sentence “she was given the book (by me). Then the direct object is also can be changed as subject of passive sentence like “the book was given her (by me). All of that be rid of fact that function of “she or her” are receiver. Indirect object is never there because the functional of English structure in this case are extremely different from Indonesian language.
3. Phonetic and phonology phonetic and phonology, the both system have affinity. katamba (1989) to formulate that “phonology is the branch of linguistics, which investigates the ways in which sounds are used systematically in different languages to form words and utterence”this knowledge are study of sound system that called phones or speech sounds. Students come from the different areas that have differents sounds system with the second language including english. A foreign language students will meet with difficulties in their learning process may be easily understood. Since childhood he has been speaking his mother tongue, which has been deeply explanted in him as part of his habits. The movements of his speech organs have been set to produce the speech sound of his own language; it will, of course, be difficult for him to change the habit of moving his speech organs in such a way as produce the foreign sound. Speaking is a mater of habit, for child in his effort to learn to speak his vernacular. Through constant imitation and repetition of the utterances produced by the people around him he succeeds in speaking the mother tongue in the same way as his elders. This takes place when the child is about six to eight years old, at which age he is considered to be an adult linguistically. In later years he may want to learn a second or foreign language, which means that he is going to learn new set of habit in speaking. The students will difficult in pronunciation the pronunciation problem such as different sound system,differentallophones,andphoneticfeature PROF.Dr.Ramelan,M.A.(1985:7-6) There are three reasons in pronunciation problems, it is very useful for teachers to understand and as a key to teach the students that have difficulties in learning foreign language. The difficulty encountered by the students in learning foreign language is caused by the different elements found between their language and target language. On the other hand, elements of the foreign language which are similar to those found in one’s native language will not offer any problems. The pronunciation problems are: ➢ Different elements in sound system between the native and the foreign language may be of several kinds. One of them is the existence of a given sound in the latter, which is not found in the former. The foreign sound is thus completely new to the students, such as the first sound of the English word ‘thigh’ an Indonesian students will find it difficult to pronounce that sound since his speech organs have never been trained or moved to produce it. The chances are that he will replace it with another sound of his own that closely resembles it like /t/ or /s/; so, instead of pronouncing /ai/ he would say /tal/ or /sal/. Other English sound which is not found in Indonesian is, for instance, those that are represented by the italicized latter in the following words: veal, then, choke, joke, she, pleasure, etc. ➢ Another learning problem may be caused by sound which have the same phonetic feature in both language but differ in their distribution-that is when and where they may occur in an utterance. This can be illustrated by the so-called voiced stop consonants /b, d, g/ which are found in both English and Indonesian. But differ in their distributions. In English those stops occur at utterance initial, medial and final position such as in the following words: book, ago, sad,. In Indonesian however they occur only at word initial and medial words: beras, kabar, in Indonesian orthography the latter b, d, g are sometimes found at word final position such as in sebab , abad, grobag, but they are pronounced as, voiceless stops. That is /p/ /t/ and /k/ respectively. ➢ There is still another source of difficulty that is caused by similar sound in the two languages, which have different variant or allophones. An allophone is a conditioned variant of significant group of sound which occurs in a fixed and predictable environment. Both English and Indonesian have the so-called voiceless stop consonants /p, t, k/. the Indonesian stops have one variant only, I, e,, the phonetic features remain unchanged whenever or wherever they occur, either in initial, medial, or final position, for instance, the voiceless stops consonants on other hand, have more than one variant: in stressed syllables they are aspirated or pronounced with a slight puff of breath as in /ph il/ thelk/, lhu:I/ in any other environment, however, they are an aspirated as in the words upper, better, beckon. Consequently, an Indonesian student will have difficulty in pronouncing the English aspirated voiceless stops in stressed positions, since their own voiceless stops consonants have no such variant in similar situation. The problems faced by the foreign language learner are especially caused by differences found between the students language and the target language so as a teachers if they want to teaching practice in to a classroom where the student were learning an English language and if we listened to them speaking that language or observed their attempt to write it, we should notice before long that the same mistakes of pronunciation, spelling, grammar ate tended to recur in the language of different individuals. In time too we should probably be able to identify the mother tongue of the students even if not a word if it not has been spoken in the classroom. Our ability to recognize the provenance of somebody who speaks our language with accent. We will focus our attention on the pronunciation problems, because in this case pronunciation is the most difficult problems. C. A few of possible significant ➢ In general when the native language of the students has more phonemic distinctions in a phonetic area then the foreign language, he find little difficulty adjusting, to the simpler phonemic pattern. Even when transferred to the foreign language they do not produce phonemic problems but merely distortion that gives their speech a foreign flavour but not different linguistic meaning. ➢ In general when the student goes from a simpler phonemic system to a more complex one he has difficulty producing and hearing the distinction that constitutes greater complexity. ➢ in matters of significant items of word order, function word, and correlation of forms the students will transfer the form of his native language with its meaning to the foreign language. For example, if the native language of the students indicate a modifier by position after the head in a modification structure, and the foreign language indicates this type of modifier by position after the head in a modification structure, and the foreign language indicates this type of modifier by a position before the head, the students will have persistent difficulty placing the modifier before the head as he does habitually in his native language. In listening and reading he will take as head what is modifier and as modifier what is head. If he is Spanish speaker he may understand milk chocolate to be a kind of milk and chocolate milk to be a kind of chocolate, instead of the opposite, which is their sense in English. ➢ Corollary. Learning the problems, that is, the structural matters that differ between the two languages, is learning the foreign language. Actually they are transferred from the native language and since they function satisfactorily they do not have to be learned anew. D. How the students learn a foreign language Although we have made considerable progress in the linguistic understanding of problems in learning a foreign language, we know very little of the psychology (emotional, memory, process, order) of learning. Teaching methods have been largely the collected practice and teaching habits of particular teachers who reacted to the memory of their own experience in learning, the example of their own teachers, and the fashion which seemed prevalent or attractive at a particular moment in the history of language teaching. It would be interesting and profitable to analyse the psychology of language learning underlying each of the more widely known methods, regardless of whether or not its author ever consciously worked out the psychology of language learning underlying his views. We need to know the element to be learned, the order in which they are learned, and other matters of importance. such as element, Among the general elements to be learned there is the linguistic form to be produced and heard, to be remembered, and to be established as a habit at the speed of speech for production and recognition in whatever environments it fits and in which it is permitted. There is also the meaning to be grasped, limited, remembered, and established as a habit at normal speaking delivery and/ or effective reading speed. And the other is also important is order of learning. Sometimes the students learn a form – a word or a construction – before learning its meaning. Later coming in contact with the same form in situation which makes sense to him or completes the partial sense which he could not accept previously, he discovers that finally he knows what this form means. In general this is a case in which the students already knows the meaning as part of his experience, and the final clarification is only a matter of associating this form with the meaning he already knows. In other instances he remembers a meaning but cannot recall the form that conveys it. There is strange in which they can encode meanings by consciously putting together the various elements and units that constitute the utterance. At this stage they speak haltingly, with long phrases at places where normally there should be none. When reading, they slowly put together each word phrase, clause, and sentence by parts. For many students of foreign language this stag is the highest ever attained. Not coming in contact with native speaker of the foreign language they and their teacher are apt to feel that knowing the foreign language. The last important element in learning foreign language is “age”. Like walking or cycling, speaking is a matter of habit. The acquisition of any habit is accomplished through repeated and untiring practice on the part of the learner. This also happens to a child in his effort to learn to speak his vernacular. Through constant imitation and repetition of the utterances produced by the people around him to be succeed in speaking the mother tongue in the same way as his elders. This takes place when the child is about six to eight years old, at which age he is considered to be an adult linguistically. In later years he may want to learn to learn second or foreign language, which means that he is going to learn a new set of habit of speaking his first language, his efforts to learn the new language will meet with strong opposition from his old established habits, which is called habit interference. Adult and older people have the problems of transfer of the habits of the native language more severely than younger people. Adult and older people have maximum difficulty in remembering the sounds they finally learn to hear and to produce, and they have the same difficulty establishing the new sounds as habits of speech. To such learners the use of written symbols for clarification and as an aid to their memory seems to be a definite help. Younger people, as young as three and four years old, have great facility imitating foreign sounds and remembering them. The three and four year olds have no use for written symbols as an aid to pronunciation. Elementary School children learning a foreign language could learn its pronunciation without recourse to writing. Teaching them the writing system of the foreign language is an end in itself and not and aid to speaking. High school children are at a transition stage in which limited use of special symbols can be assistance. All students of psychology, for they think and react, and they probably think about our behaviour occasionally. Child learners differ from adult learners in many ways. Their attention is of shorter duration, they are quite differently motivated and their interest are less specialised. In terms of physical ability it is probably in the area of visual and aural comprehension that there are the greatest differences between child and adult learner. It is in every teachers and parents experience that children go through stage of listing items in one picture, classifying the event in each pictures and then to preface or extend the total content of the sequence of pictures. Reading and writing speeds, in the native language and at a level of content well within the students ability, are physical abilities with a large intellectual component. Fluency and accuracy of speech (in terms of his normal performance in his own native speech) have a negative rather than positive contribution to language learning; they can inhibit control of a language and may prevent the achievement of full proficiency.

CONCLUSSION

1. Language is unique. If we compare one language with another language we will see that there are similarities and differences. Each language has some characteristics which make it different from other languages. These characteristic are concerned with the sound system, the system of words formation, the system of sentence formation and other systems.
2. Language is a system it has certain rules that are learned and used by human when they are speaking or writing. Some of the rules can be seen in phonology. On phonology we know that only certain sound system can be used in a language. If there were no system on a language, there would not be a language. We can learn a language because it has a system.
3. Influence of mother tongue in learning foreign language including English is, as evidence it is not new.
4. In learning foreign language including English the students will find many problems that caused by interference of mother tongue. And they have difficulties to speak English or they can speak English but with incorrect pronunciation.
5. There are many difficulties and error for students, because speaking is a matter of habit so if they wants to learn a foreign language the students will obviously meet with all kinds learning problems such as how to pronounce, because there are many difficulties to pronounce foreign language because since childhood the students have speaking their mother tongue, which has been deeply explanted in him as part of his habits.
6. There are some aspects that interference of mother tongue such as morphology, syntactic, phonetic and phonology because they are aspect of language that have related each other.
7. To fluent in English language the students can practice the second language with the native and use the second language for communicate each other, so the key is practice and practice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ilen W.S., 1951. Living English Speech. Longmans.
Ramlan. 1985. English Phonetics. IKIP Semarang Press.
Widdoson, G, H. 1997. Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics. In honour. Oxford University Press.
Wilkins, D.1994. Linguistics in Language Teaching. In R.E. Asher (ed.): the the encyclopaedia language and linguistics (vol.1).oxford:p pergamon press.
Muhammad. 2004. Belajar Mikro Linguistik. LIEBE book press. Banguntapan Bantul Yogyakarta
Alwi et.al. 2000. Tata Buku Bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta.Balai Pustaka.
Keraaf, goryss. 1991. Tata Bahasa Rujukan Bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta: Gramedia Widia Sarana.

Electronic sources
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Bibliography: Ilen W.S., 1951. Living English Speech. Longmans. Ramlan. 1985. English Phonetics. IKIP Semarang Press. Widdoson, G, H. 1997. Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics. In honour. Oxford University Press. Wilkins, D.1994. Linguistics in Language Teaching. In R.E. Asher (ed.): the the encyclopaedia language and linguistics (vol.1).oxford:p pergamon press. Muhammad. 2004. Belajar Mikro Linguistik. LIEBE book press. Banguntapan Bantul Yogyakarta Alwi et.al. 2000. Tata Buku Bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta.Balai Pustaka. Keraaf, goryss. 1991. Tata Bahasa Rujukan Bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta: Gramedia Widia Sarana. Electronic sources http://www.wikipedia.com/resources/units/unit1/unit-7.shtml.