A Case Study of NL Influence in Students’ Interlanguage
Irmala Sukendra
English Language Education, Universitas Islam Syekh Yusuf, Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia
Keywords: Interlanguage, Second Language, Language Acquisition.
Abstract: Interlanguage is a learner’s phase in developing their competence in second language (L2). This study
intends to find out whether the students go through the phase of interlanguage in their attempt to acquire
second language and whether their interlanguage forms similar system as postulated in Krashen’s
hypotheses. A structured writing test of 150 words essay was given to thirty students of fourth semester
students of University of Islam Syekh Yusuf Tangerang, faculty of teacher training and education of English
Department. Their writing results were then analyzed focusing on how pluralization of nouns is formed and
classification is made based on the pluralization formats. It is found that the students formed 134 times of
different format of nouns. The learners formed interlanguage of pluralization in which they formed count
nouns from what the TL rule acknowledges as non-count nouns by adding articles (a/an). They also formed
singular nouns into plural form and vice versa which may be caused by the L1 influence of noun concept.
The pluralization forms also consist of characteristics of previously learned languages, features of L2 and
general interlanguage characteristics.
1 INTRODUCTION
Regardless to the facts that English is being taught to
Indonesian students from early age, many
Indonesians are still thriving in acquiring the
language. They find it quite troublesome to acquire
the language especially up to the level of
communicative competence. Wong-Fillmore in Jay
(2003) described learning a second language as a
process that consists of learning large chunks of
speech that are used for communication purposes.
However, Second Language Acquisition has several
obstacles for learners to face and yet the
successfulness of mastering the language never
surmounts to the one of the native speakers.
Learners have never been able to acquire the
language as any native does. Mistakes are made and
inter-language is unavoidable.
Learning a second language (SL) is different
from acquiring first language (L1) in terms that in
SL learning learners are already equipped with L1
knowledge. Rueda (2006) states that adult L2 or FL
learners initially rely on L1 transfers to
communicate linguistic action in the TL. Therefore,
although some learners may be more successful than
the others, mistakes are made and inter-language is
unavoidable. For Selinker as cited in Tarone (2006)
SL acquisition is different from L1 acquisition, so
there is no child language (but interlanguage) as the
original mechanism for learning (lateralization) are
atrophied (fossilization). Selinker as cited in Tarone
(2006) defines interlanguage as the linguistic system
evidenced when an adult second language learner
attempts to express meaning in the language being
learned. Learner’s interlanguage is considered as a
phase a learner goes through in developing their
competence in L2.
Krashen (1982) presents an average order of
acquisition of grammatical morphemes for English
as a second language of children and adults as the
following:
ING (progressive); PLURAL; COPULA (“to
be”) ---> AUXILIARY (progressive, as in “he is
going”); ARTICLE (a, the) ---> IRREGULAR
PAST ---> REGULAR PAST; III SINGULAR -s;
POSSESSIVE -s
This means that L2 learners are more likely to
form an interlanguage in respect to this order. In
terms of pluralization Bahasa Indonesia case of
pluralization is very different from English, in which
Sneddon (2010) states that plurality in Indonesian is
indicated by reduplication (p.20), numbers (p.60)
and quantifiers (p.136) whereas English has regular
Sukendra, I.
A Case Study of NL Influence in Students’ Interlanguage.
In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Educational Sciences (ICES 2017) - Volume 2, pages 175-178
ISBN: 978-989-758-314-8
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
175

form of pluralization which is inflected by
morpheme –s/-es and irregular form of pluralization.
This may be difficult for some students to master
inferring that they are highly influenced by their L1
paradigm. A learner may develop an interlanguage
system in which just one of such factors governs a
set of form-function associations, which should be
described in their own right, regardless that the yield
forms are not allowed by L2 rules.
The students of University of Islam Syekh Yusuf
Tangerang, faculty of teacher training and education
of English Department have fairly poor L2
competence (as inflicted from the entrance test
results in the form of TOEFL prediction test which
showed less than 5% of the students got more than
400, 95% are between 330-400). Therefore, this
paper intends to find out whether the students (30
students) go through the phase of interlanguage in
their attempt to L2 acquisition and to find out the
patterns of pluralization of their interlanguage,
whether it is highly influence by their L1 or not; and
to what extent is the influence. The study is aimed to
provide description on how L1 may influence
students’ language production in their attempt to
achieve competence in second language.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Ellis (1997: pp. 3-5) defines second language
acquisition as the study of the way people learn a
language besides their mother tongue. SLA is
emphasized on the nature of learnability which
influenced by the social background where the
learning takes place and the input that the learners
obtained. L2 learners are said to be successful when
they have the language competence and language
performance. The term competence-performance
was first introduced by Chomsky in 1965 to refer to
“knowledge of grammar and of other aspects of
language and performance to mean the language
use”. Chomsky believes that the competence of
someone can be determined by the performance or
how they use the language and vice-versa (Ellis,
1994, p.5). Yule (2006, p.169) asserts that
communicative competence is “the general ability to
use language accurately, appropriately, and
flexibly”, which means L2 learners are expected to
achieve communicative competence, a competence
which covers grammatical competence,
sociolinguistic competence, strategic competence,
and communication strategy.
However, L2 learners may not find the ease of
acquiring this competence-performance as they did
with their L1. Saville (2006) said that there are
differences in L1 and L2 learning, in which although
learners of both L1 and L2 go through similar initial
state, during the second phase, the L2 learners
develop a mental sequence which is known as
interlanguage (learner language). Interlanguage, as
defined by Ellis (2003), is “the structured system
which the learner constructs at any given stage in his
development” and “the series of interlocking system
or learner’s ‘build-in syllabuses.” Similarly,
Tavakoli (2012) states that interlanguage is “the type
of language produced by second- and foreign-
language learners who are in the process of learning
a language”. Learner’s interlanguage is the
competence that L2 learners obtained in their effort
of acquiring L2 which is not a part of L2 nor derived
from learner’s native language.
Interlanguage may quite commonly exhibit
systematic properties which show no apparent
resemblance to the native language or any other
language known to the learner. In some cases,
interlanguage systems occur which are different
from both the target and native language even where
these latter resemble each other (Corder, 1981).
Selinker as cited in Tarone (2006) asserts that there
are five psycholinguistic processes of the latent
psychological structure that shape interlanguage,
which are: native language transfer,
overgeneralization of target language rules, transfer
of training (i.e. a rule enters the learner’s system as a
result of instruction), strategies of communication
(i.e.an identifiable approach by the learner to
communication with native speakers) , and strategies
of L2 learning (i.e.an identifiable approach by the
learner to the material to be learned).
Interlanguage therefore is different from
learner’s error or mistake in which error is gap in
learner’s knowledge whereas mistake is occasional
lapses in performance (Ellis, 2003), which means
that interlanguage is learner’s creation of linguistic
element as his/her attempt to acquire L2. Hence, a
learner may develop an interlanguage system in
which just one of such factors governs a set of form-
function associations, which should be described in
their own right, regardless of the fact that they yield
forms not allowed by L2 rules. It is well-understood
that interlanguages are autonomous and rule-
governed linguistic systems whose grammar cannot
be described simply in terms of errors and deviations
from L2 norms.
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3 METHODS
The study was carried out by giving a structured
writing test to thirty students of fourth semester
students of University of Islam Syekh Yusuf
Tangerang, faculty of teacher training and education
of English Department. Students were asked to write
an approximately 150 words essay based on the
given pictures. Students were told that the purpose
of the writing is on the flow of the story. This is
done so they did not focus on the grammar accuracy.
The result of their writing then analyzed focusing on
how the students form their pluralization of nouns
and after that classification is made based on the
pluralization formats. The task was taken from
Tarone and Swierzbin (2009) which is in the form of
sequence pictures for narrative task.
4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION:
THE STUDENTS'
INTERLANGUAGE OF
PLURALIZATION
In writing the narrative essay, the students formed
new format of pluralization in which they did not
follow rules of the native language or the target
language (of English). The thirty students formed
134 times of different format of nouns. The students’
production of the language shows that they formed
an interlanguage of pluralization as can be described
in the table below:
Table 1: Number of occurrences of interlanguage types.
Types of Interlanguage
Number of Occurrence
UC-C
60
Sg-Pl
56
Pl-Sg
20
Form
7
The learners formed interlanguages of
pluralization which comprise the use of countable
form for uncountable nouns, the use of singular form
for plural nouns and vice-versa, and double the
pluralization forms.
In UC-C, learners formed countable forms of
what were supposed to be uncountable in English
(L1), for example: a sugar, foods, a bread, a jam,
and a food. The learners did this mostly that it
reaches 42%. The learners also put the singular
nouns into plural forms and vice-versa, for example:
young girls, other things, an old woman, some
candy, some egg, and many things. In forming plural
for singular nouns, the learners made 56 attempts,
that are 39.2% and forming singular for plural nouns
for 20x which is 14% of the total interlanguage
formed. Besides those items mentioned above, the
learners also construct ‘double pluralization’ such
as: a somethings and two children’s but only 7 times
out of 143 times.
In Bahasa Indonesia pluralization forms are not
constructed by adding any inflection to the nouns.
Reduplication, numbers, and quantifiers are used to
form the nouns into plural forms, for example:
“rumah” is singular, but “rumah-rumah” is plural,
“dua rumah” is plural, and “beberapa rumah” is
also plural. However, the learners formed
pluralization forms without following Bahasa
Indonesia or English’s rules of pluralization. Take
for example when they wrote a sugar. The concept
of sugar is also uncountable in Bahasa Indonesia, yet
they put it into countable by deliberately placed an
‘a’ as indefinite singular marker. The learners added
–s inflection to plural nouns such as children and
women too.
The learners seemed to be confused with the
concept of numbers which are usually determined by
partitives or classifiers in Bahasa Indonesia.
Sneddon (2010) writes that partitives indicate a
particular amount of something. They precede the
head word, which can be either a count or a non-
count noun. Count noun can alternatively be
preceded by cardinal number or a number plus
classifier but non-count nouns cannot. To indicate
singular, se- ‘one’ precedes the partitive. Partitives
are often mixed up with classifiers. However, there
is clear distinction: classifiers group nouns on the
basis of some perceived intrinsic characteristics,
while partitives group nouns on the basis of how
they are measured, assembled, or processed.
The learners formed different format of
pluralization, which can be categorized as their
interlanguage in their effort to acquiring the TL. The
learners’ attempt to describe nouns seems to be
affected by the concept of inflection as a
generalization of the TL rules of pluralization. In
English, regular form of pluralization is marked by
adding inflection –s, which made them adding –s to
most nouns they wrote. The learners’ production can
also be categorized as being influenced by their
native language as there is similarity in the forming
of the nouns. Considering that Bahasa Indonesia
does not classifies nouns into count and non-count,
the learners made generalization for most nouns,
such as: jam, bread, and food into count noun. Their
native language also assists them in term of forming
the concept that the noun should be preceded by a
A Case Study of NL Influence in Students’ Interlanguage
177

determiner in which they got confused between
classifier and partitives. This reasoning may be the
reason why they put indefinite determiner ‘a’ before
uncountable nouns.
5 CONCLUSIONS
This study concludes that the learners formed
interlanguage of pluralization in which they formed
count nouns from what the TL rule acknowledges as
non-count nouns by adding articles (a/an). They also
formed singular nouns into plural form and vice
versa which may be caused by the L1 influence of
noun concept, for example: repetition in Bahasa
Indonesia in the word “anak-anak” could mean both
child/ little boy or girl (singular) or children (plural).
This L1 noun concept could influence the learners to
transfer the rule into forming TL linguistic material.
In forming the pluralization, the learners also
overgeneralized TL rule, in which they add
inflection –s to nouns which they considered to be
plural such as children’s and women.
Language acquisition is not a cumulative linear
process and it therefore cannot be predicted when a
certain form will become learnable for a certain
learner. In forming pluralization, the learners applied
two of five processes of language learning which
lead to the forming of interlanguage, which are
native language transfer and overgeneralization of
TL linguistic materials. The pluralization forms also
consist of characteristics of previously learned
languages, features of L2 and general interlanguage
characteristics such as omission of function words
and grammatical morphemes as the indication of
interlanguage phase.
In relation to that, Ruegg (2010) claims that
language learners are in the process of developing
their language skills. They are making different
types of errors, which is the manifestation of the
development of interlanguage. Thus, when the
learners made errors in forming the pluralization,
they were in the phase of acquiring the TL by
forming interlanguage. Interlanguage evolves over
time as a result of various strategies that learners use
to make sense of the language input and to control
the output. Therefore, some elements of the
interlanguage may be the result of learners’ specific
approach to the language material to be learnt, i.e.
their selection of learning strategies.
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Krashen, S. D., 1982. Principles and practice in second
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Rueda, Y. T., 2006. Developing pragmatic competence in
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Ruegg, R., 2010. Interlanguage development: the effect of
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Saville, T. M., 2006. Introducing second language
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