Syntactic structure analysis of the interlanguage constructed by the students of English Department of State Islamic University of Malang using X-Bar Theory

ABSTRACT

By the late 19605و in studying second language acquisition (SLA), linguists had been concerning to Interlanguage study in more detail and in much the same way that first language learning had been studied for some time. So far, there has been a comparative fallacy in investigating interlanguage (Bley-Vroman, 1983, Cook, 1999, White, 1998). Having considered such comparative fallacy, several linguists suggested another perspective of accounting for interlanguage that is studying interlanguage in its own right and researchers on this field need to establish patterns in the interlanguage itself, rather than measuring L2 speech against that of natives.

The objective of this study is to investigate interlanguage in its own right. I studied the interlanguage syntactic structures of the 44 students of English Department of State Islamic University (UIN) of Malang in the first semester. The method used in this study was a Cross-Sectional study. This study was under Universal Grammar framework and, in this case, I used X-Bar Theory as one of universal grammar modules to map or represent the interlanguage constructions. I analyze the interlanguage based on their syntactic categories (phrase, clause and sentence). Then, I discussed the results of the analysis to find the natures of the interlanguage grammar or construction itself.

I have found that most of their interlanguage grammar had impairments in all of its categories. I categorized such interlanguage into four different natures: l) overusing-complement, 2) null-projector, 3) overusing-specifier and 4) overusing- head. The interesting one in my study is that there was a null-head or null-projector. Whereas, a head is a compulsory in X-Bar schemata. Thus, it is very important to be considered in more detail because it can tell US the problem of studying English.

Based on my findings I suggest that, by considering how important interlanguage is, the next researchers working on SLA continue this imconcluded study by reexamining my findings or making another research to have a support or, simply, a counter-finding in order to have a deeper understanding of the learner’s language constructions, that is Interlanguage.