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mother tongue (H. Y. Chang, personal
communication, November 10, 2017). In this case,
Shine substitutes the /θ/ with /s/ (personal
communication, November 10, 2017). Furthermore,
she said that the /l/ sound can only appear syllable-
initially in Chinese language. That is why most
Chinese speakers have more trouble with an /l/
sound at the end of a word, so what they typically do
is either to drop the final consonant sound or to
substitute it with the similar sound in their mother
tongue.
3.2 Morphological Interference
There are two significant morphological errors that
Shine constantly makes when using his English. The
first one is related to the verb conjugation confusion.
The term “confusion” is used because it is found that
he sometimes can use the verb correctly in simple
past when talking about his past experience in
learning English, for example the verb ‘forgot’ (L9).
However, most of the times he does not add the
inflectional morpheme –ed in the verbs to denote
past tense, like in the verbs ‘study’ (L10), ‘start’
(L12), and ‘ask’ (L16).
Sometimes Shine uses the auxiliary verb ‘do’
functioning as do-support which is used to support
the construction of the negative (Biber, Conrad &
Leech, 2002) in its present form when he talks about
his childhood experience in learning English (L5 &
L32-L33). There are also times when he does not
conjugate the verbs at all to indicate the tense, for
example the verb ‘teach’ (L4) is neither used in its
correct form ‘taught’ nor added the inflectional
morpheme –s ‘teaches’ to make it in agreement with
the third person singular subject ‘the teacher’ if he
wants to make it in the present tense. The
morphological error took place several times during
the interview as seen in the verbs ‘ask’ (L16 & L59)
and ‘call’ (L61).
The other error is gender confusion. Shine uses
the function morphemes ‘he’ and ‘she’
interchangeably when talking about the same person.
When he talked about his high school teacher who
helped him the most in learning English, he uses the
pronoun ‘she’ (L58) at first but uses ‘he’ (L61) later
to refer to the same person.
To get explanation why these morphological
errors take place, the Chinese peer was again
consulted to find out whether they have any relation
with Chinese language system. She explained that
there is no such thing as verb conjugation to denote
tenses in Chinese (H. Y. Chang, personal
communication, November 10, 2017). For example,
Chinese speakers know only a single word that
means go. If they want to use the present tense, they
simply say "I go", "yesterday I go" for the past
tense, and "tomorrow I go" for the future. She
furthermore said that verb conjugation is one of the
most difficult parts of the English language for
native Chinese speakers to master, simply because
there are so many tenses, and each can only be
properly used in select situations. The same reason
can be used to explain the gender confusion Shine
has when using personal pronouns, ‘he’ and ‘she’. In
Chinese, the separate gender pronouns do not exist.
Thus, when Chinese speakers learn English, they
often forget to use the appropriate pronouns to
indicate gender.
3.3 Syntactic Interference
The data analysis also reveals two points of L1
syntactic interference on Shine’s English. The first
one is the use of definite and indefinite articles
(‘a/an’ and ‘the’). It is interesting to see that Shine’s
mistakes in this particular part of speech happen
because he inserts the articles, especially the definite
article ‘the’, in places where it does not belong, for
example when he says, ‘the Chinese’ (L7) and ‘the
English’ (L9). However, in general he does not find
much difficulty to use articles in obligatory contexts
like in ‘the teacher’ (L4) and ‘a language’ (L32-
L33).
The second interesting syntactic aspect from
Shine’s speech is the reduplication he makes when
he wants to emphasize the meaning of particular
words. This pattern appears twice in the interview
when he explains the importance of memorization
for him in learning English (L59–L64). Instead of
using adverbs to intensify the verb ‘remember’ (L59
& L63), he repeats it twice which makes it awkward
not only to say but also to hear.
The Chinese peer seemed surprised when reading
the result of this analysis, especially the one related
to the use of article. Chinese has bigger number and
more complicated articles compared to those in
English, so articles should not be a problem for
Chinese speakers learning English (H. Y. Chang,
personal communication, November 10, 2017). She
had no explanation for these phenomena. Her
assumption is that Shine does not have the
vocabulary to use to emphasize the meaning, so he
repeats it twice.
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