Mother Tongue Interference in the Writing of English as a Second Language (ESL) Malay Learners

Abstract

The objective of this study is to identify the errors in writing committed by Malay ESL learners which can be attributed to mother tongue interference. Twenty pre-degree quantity surveyor students from Universiti Teknologi MARA Perak campus participated in the study. They were instructed to write between 200- to 300-word essays on a given topic in English and in Malay. Their compositions were analyzed using the algorithm for conducting error analysis (EA) proposed by James (1998) which are practiced by current EA practitioners. Since the main focus of the study is mother tongue interference, only errors related to L1 interference were addressed. The paper presents and discusses the descriptive analysis of the results in relation to three major types of interference which are ‘transfer of rules’, ‘redundancy reduction’ and ‘overgeneralization’.