NEGATIVE TRANSFER OF SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT IN EFL COLLEGE STUDENTS’ WRITINGS : A CASE STUDY AT ENGLISH DEPARTMENT FACULTY OF LETTERS ANDALAS UNIVERSITY
Hanafi & Ni Putu Amalia C
English Department –
ABSTRACT
This study attempts to distinguish negative transfer and unsuccessful automaticity in the process of acquiring English rule of subject and verb agreement, as applied in EFL college students’ writings. Informants are English department students of
Keywords: Negative Transfer, Subject-Verb Agreement, Automaticity, writing skill
INTRODUCTION
The central issue of this paper constitutes the notion of ‘transfer’ in EFL college students’ writings. The differentiation between negative transfer and unsuccessful automaticity reflected in participants’ acquisition of English subject and verb agreement through writing products becomes the foci of the study. This paper starts with the acquisition of English rules of Subject and Verb Agreement in EFL writing. Then, a brief review on studies of transfer follows and precedes the review of automaticity in the Second Language Acquisition (
ACQUIRING THE ENGLISH RULES OF SUBJECT AND VERB AGREEMENT IN EFL WRITING
In general, acquiring English in a foreign language (FL) context is relatively more difficult than in the second language (L2) context. In an FL context, on one hand, e.g. Indonesians learning English in
Due to the paper’s length limit, this paper explores only the acquisition of English grammatical rules of Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA here-to-forth) in EFL writing. Unlike acquiring speaking skill, EFL learners usually find more difficulties in achieving accuracy in writing skill. There are two factors that learners need to consider when practicing writing. They are vocabulary and grammar. Vocabulary is particularly needed in order to deliver the idea a writer gets in their head onto the paper. Despite their great ideas, a writer without sufficient bank of lexicon will have difficulty to start writing. They need to go back and forth to dictionaries to find the right word for their ideas. The longer time they consume to do this, the more frustrating the writing activity will be.
After dealing with vocabulary problems, a beginning writer will have to cope with the more delicate obstacle in EFL writing, i.e. grammar. Herewith, the grammar issue in focus is restricted only to the acquisition of English SVA in writing. This aspect of grammar is important especially for Indonesians because of the presence of a fundamental difference between English and Indonesian language, i.e. a two-directionally influential relationship. When talking about subject and verb relationship, English language embeds not only the countability or non-countability factor but also time markers in it. Moreover, the term ‘finite’ (Halliday, 1994) or traditionally called ‘auxiliary’ functions to indicate the nature of actions, situation, and time (Frank, 1972; Nelson, 2001). When observing it in such productive skill as writing, our preliminary observation indicates that Indonesian EFL learners tend to produce this kind of unnecessary error in their writing. Surprisingly, when being tested through multiple choice or gap filling practices, EFL learners on college level can actually perform well indicating that they have knowledge about it. The question is why do they still commit it when writing?
INDONESIAN NEGATIVE TRANSFER OF SVA IN EFL WRITING
To answer the question, we need to take a look at the theoretical analysis for such error to occur. In the context of
AUTOMATICITY IN EFL WRITING
The term automaticity refers to the concept that language production has become spontaneous that the producer does not have to give so much attention anymore in the production process and the results are accurate (Segalowitz, 2005). Research efforts on automaticity are commonly associated with speaking fluency (De Ridder, Vangehuchten, & Gomez. 2007; Hulstijn, 1990). There is few or even no study on the automaticity on writing. Therefore, this study goes outside the mainstream because it is believed that automaticity and transfer can also be investigated in free writing. Another importance of this study is related to the fact that most classroom examinations especially on content subjects assign students to respond to the question by writing a free brief essay. Even language tests such as TOEFL and IELTS have a writing component that assesses a test-taker’s writing skill. These conditions provide students with less time to review and edit. Consequently, lack of accuracy will also affect the writing quality.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
- Do senior students comprehend SVA rule more correctly than the junior students do?
- Do senior students apply SVA rule in their writings more correctly than the junior students do?
- Is there any difference between the students’ grammar test score and their use of SVA in writing?
METHODS
Data collection
Data are collected primarily through a survey questionnaire. Students from English Department are invited to fill in the questionnaire which contains writing and survey questionnaire section. This questionnaire provides raw data for the analysis. After being processed using simple statistic calculation, the data can produce analytical outcome to show trends of use of SVA in students’ writing.
Informants
There are 38 students participating in this study from various classes (2008–2005). Among them, there are 31 female and 7 male students. After being stratified, they are invited on a random sampling procedure. From every class, every student with the first registered number of 5, then 10, 15, and so on is attended and invited to participate. This multiplication of five continues until it reaches ten students from the class. Unfortunately, most of the ones replying to the invitation are female students. Therefore, the intervening variable of gender difference may be unavoidable.
Instruments
This study’s data result from a survey questionnaire consisting of four sections. Firstly, students are asked about their personal information such as registered number, gender, first language, etc. Secondly, they are asked to write up a free simple essay. Next, a Grammar Drilling Section on SVA is provided for them where they choose the correct answer from two options in each item. At last, a background check survey section ends the questionnaire for finding the pattern of their learning methods and strategies.
Data Analysis
To analyze the data, students’ essays are marked on the basis of the number of clause written. It is important to see it in clauses because of the assumption that some of them will write in complex sentences. The measurement through the use of clause will also enable us to evaluate their writing quantity in producing propositions which accordingly provide SVA data for later analysis. Afterwards, their SVA errors in the clauses will be counted and calculated in percentage. This result of SVA errors in essay is compared to the grammar drilling section in order to confirm the claim that students have sufficient comprehension level in this form. Then, participants’ learning strategies and expectations on their improved performance of writing can be traced from this last section. The frequency of responses is calculated into percentage.
RESULTS
As shown in the following chart, the grammar test section shows that around 47% students achieve 61-80% score and 32% participants can earn 81-100% score. This indicates that majority of the participants can correctly answer more than 60 percent of the items in drilling practices reflecting sufficient understanding on the grammar rule. However, the essay section reveals the unexpected fact that half of the participants still produce around 20% errors on SVA, and ten out of 38 students makes 30% SVA errors. Only a few (3 informants) produce significantly most errors (51 – 100%).
Results on the class comparison also show an anomaly. In the grammar drill, more freshmen (4 out of 9) perform better (81-100%) compared to sophomore (67%) who perform less (61-80%). Half of junior students answer less correct (41-60%) than their senior (70%) who can provide more correct answers (61-80%). In terms of SVA errors on essays, a surprising finding occurs. Fewer freshmen perform well by making less SVA errors (20%) while the same number of sophomore students makes more errors (50%). However, this may happen because they write few clauses (average 20). Surprisingly, more junior (60%) and senior (70%) students make the same number of error (20%). The fact that they write more clauses may explain this phenomenon.
The survey background section also reveals unusual facts. Majority of students (92%) have learnt English for more than 7 years. Despite their eagerness to having English writing skill (87%), only few (5 out of 38) love writing activity very much and most of them (53%) simply ‘like’ doing it. Their motivation to have the skill is various from the desire to be good at writing academically (26%) to the desire of becoming journalists (37%) or writing diary or reviews in web blogs (34%). Most of the participants (88%) start learning writing at school and at home (11%). Moreover, their writing activity ranges from assignments (45%), diaries (13%), and both (24%). In terms of frequency, the participants admit to write 3-4 times (44%) and more than 5 times (44%) a week. They mostly (82%) do editing and proofreading by themselves (34%) and by help from others (29%). Among the writing difficulties offered, grammar is their biggest (61%) problem. When coming to self-evaluation, most of them assess themselves on the level of 7 (50%) and 8 (21%). Only few participants claims to have the 6 (5 out of 38) and 5 (4 out of 38) levels.
DISCUSSION
The results have presented the fact that there has been a considerable lack of attention to the automaticity of applying SVA rule in writing. Majority of informants in this study comprehend the concept of SVA rule proven by their high score (over 61% of correct answers) in the grammar drill sections (79%). However, their essay proves that there is a problem of habitual negative transfer that most of them might have got in earlier learning period. Despite their knowledge, these participants cannot automatically apply the SVA rule when writing. This brings us into a speculation that they did not pay attention too intensively toward this ‘little’ mistake in the earlier time. Gradually, this neglectfulness may finally form a habit that dies hard and eventually reduces the writing quality. To some extent, this can be seen from the more SVA errors that senior students make in their writing. We speculate that such habit is formed from the neglectfulness of the teacher too in guiding their students to do editing process which focuses on the grammar check before finalizing and submitting their writing tasks for assessment.
The importance of this editing process is supported by the finding on students’ learning strategies. Most of them (82%) claim that they check their writing before submission. Among them, large proportions do the editing and proofreading process by themselves (34%) and by help of others (29%). This shows that there is awareness that these two ‘restructuring’ activities (McLaughlin, 1990) are necessary for writing quality improvement. Unfortunately, the questionnaire does not have items investigating the role of teachers facilitating this necessity. Nevertheless, this outcome rings an alarm that there is a need for incorporating this aspect in the process of learning and teaching writing in order to support the automated use of such simple routine grammatical rules as SVA.
IMPLICATIONS ON LANGUAGE TEACHING
There are at least three implications of this study to the language teaching and assessment. First of all, teachers need to start incorporating the information technology into the teaching of writing. Students’ motivation to write as a journalist, to produce literary works, and to communicate through blogs and reviews clearly indicate this necessity. Therefore, teachers can facilitate this desire positively by allowing them to create their own blogs and encouraging them to write on newspapers or a network web blogs. Second of all, Teachers need to share the teaching focus on the collaborative editing methods instead of simply teaching writing. Students can also learn from their friends about the way to deliver ideas in a paragraph as well as reminding each other on grammatical errors such SVA. At last, multiple choice assessment in writing process or any other grammar drill test in evaluating improvement in students’ writing skills may need putting aside as complementary or secondary evaluation. End results from a long guided editing activity over their writing productions should become the main concern so that students can see writing as a three-phased process whose ultimate quality relies on the final procedure, i.e. editing and proofreading. Therefore, they will understand that they can achieve best in the maximum level if conducting serious editing and proofreading processes before submitting their essays for marking.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, it is clearly seen that negative transfer commonly happens in the earlier time of learning. As proven by the result of essay writing on the freshmen, negative transfer may evidently be the case in their early period or learning writing. When this issue is continuously neglected, they will form a habit which results in unsuccessful automaticity as shown in the sophomore, junior, and senior students’ writings. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that the junior students do not have enough comprehension over the SVA rule. Their score on SVA grammar test is relatively higher than their seniors. However, errors that they produce in their essays are variously more than their seniors do. Therefore, it can be concluded that the senior students seem to comprehend SVA rules and apply them more correctly than the junior students do. The same case occurs between junior and sophomore students where junior students perform better than the sophomores do. Freshmen, however, seems to be out of ordinary because they evidently comprehend SVA rule more correctly and apply it consistently more accurate than the sophomores do. The reason for this unexpected outcome may be due to the shorter essay the juniors produce. This seems to help them minimize SVA errors. At last, a negative correlation may result from the two different kinds of test. The higher score a student gets in their grammar drill, the fewer SVA errors they make in the essay. However, this study is not designed to address its significance. Therefore, deeper and more comprehensive future investigations need to be conducted by considering these aspects.
REFERENCES
De Ridder,
Ellis, R. (1997). Second language acquisition.
Frank, Marcela. (1972). Modern English : Part I.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd ed.
Hulstijn, J.H. (1990). A comparison between the information-processing and the analysis/control approaches to language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11/1: 30-45
McLaughlin, B. (1990). Restructuring. Applied Linguistics, 11/2: 113-128.
Nelson, G. (2001). English: An essential grammar.
Segalowitz, N. Automaticity and second languages. In Doughty, C.J. & M. H. Long. (2005). The handbook of second language acquisition. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell Publisher, pp.382-408.
Smith, M.S. (1983). Cross-linguistic aspects of second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 4/3: 192-198.
No comments:
Post a Comment