Errors in the Use of Verbs

Based on the error categorization framework (Nesselhauf, 2005, p. 251), the verb- related errors were further divided based on three sub-categories which are reflected in the table below.

Table 4.2: Verb Error Percentage

Error Types Percentage of Errors

wrong verb tense 12 (23.53%) nonexistent verbs/deviant

form of verbs 9 (17.65%) wrong choice of verb 3 (5.88%)

Error types Examples Percentage of

errors

2 Determiner i. article missing

ii. article unacceptable or wrong

i. *Amir takes risk to swim

(Amir takes the risk to swim)

ii. *John made a decision to ask

(John made the decision to ask)

6 (11.7%) 6 (11.7%)

12 (23.4%)

2. Usage 1

i. combination exists but inaccurate

i.* the family decide to make the decision (the family make the decision)

10 (19.6 %)

4 Prepositions

i. wrong choice of preposition

i. *he got in the car

(he got into the car) 5 (9.8%)

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As the table shows, the most common errors made were the use of verbs in the wrong verb tense which made up a total of 12 errors or 23.53% of all the verb-related errors. This is followed by the creation of nonexistent or deviant form of verbs in which 9 errors were made or 17.65%. Finally, the wrong choice of verb in the formation of verb-noun collocations reflected the least number of errors with a total of 3 errors or 5.88% out of the 24 errors made. The errors identified are discussed as follows.

According to Richards (1974), errors in the language use can be discussed in terms of negative intralingual transfer which reflects the learners’ competence at a particular stage. The errors made are the results of partial internalization of the rules and restrictions of the target language (Richards, 1974). The following examples of “wrong verb tense” were extracted from the participants’ written production. The erroneous patterns are reflected in comparison to the corrected version

Table 4.3: Examples of wrong verb tense

Participants’ written production Correction

(1) Last Sunday, Alice makes the arrangement to go

to the beach. made the arrangement (2) In the car, Amir have a chat with his family. had a chat

(2) Then, she built a sandcastle while have a chat with

her father. having a chat

(3) John and his brother make a decision to built a

sandcastle. made a decision

to build a sandcastle

(4) After they have fun, Ahmad and his family packed

all the things. had fun

As reflected in the first example (1), the learner made an incorrect selection of verb tense when expressing the event which has happened in the past. With reference to Richards (1974), the learner exhibited what is termed as “ignorance of rule restriction”. In this vein, the example (1) showed that the learner accounted only for the “subject-verb-

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agreement” in that the singular noun “Alice” was given a singular verb (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman (1999). In doing so, the time aspect “Last Sunday” was overlooked and resulted in the inaccurate use of verb tense for the verb “make”. Other tense related error was made as shown in example (3) in which the learners inaccurately used the simple past tense form “have a chat” instead of the progressive form “having a chat” which is appropriate to the context of the time-frame “while” as used in the sentence. Similarly, verb tense error is apparent in example (4) in that the learner expressed the verb in the simple past form “to built” instead of the accurate to-infinitive form “to build”.

Using similar examples, to certain degree, the errors can be discussed in terms of the learners’ L1 habits. Corder (1981) states that these habits reflect their understanding of the L1’s patterns, systems or rules which may impede their complete understanding of L2 structures. According to Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) the verb system in English is inflected. For instance, generally, the suffix –ed is used to signify that a situation happened in the past. In contrast, within the learners’ L1 system one of which is Malay language, Omar (2009) outlines the three time-frames which reflect the way an action is viewed in the Malay language, without having to change the verb form. Basically, three time-frames are used in the Malay language: “action not yet done” is expressed with the use of the adverb “belum”, for “action being done”, the adverbs used are “sedang” or “masih” and finally, to signal the “actions already completed” the adverbs used are “telah”, “sudah” and “pernah” (Omar, 2009). Therefore, to certain extent, the learners may have resorted to their L1’s rules and systems. In addition to this, their understanding of the variegated verb system in the target language may still be incomplete at the time this study was conducted.

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In addition, the findings also indicated that the learners have the tendency to create nonexistent or deviant verb form in expressing verb tenses.

Table 4.4: Examples of deviant verb form

Participants’ written production Correction

(6) John payed attention on the road paid attention (7) Zaid and his brother maked the decision to swim made the decision (8) Halim’s mother maked preparation and packed

everything needed made preparation

Essentially, Richards (1974) and Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) explained that L2 learners are susceptible to make the indicated verb-form errors due to “overgeneralization”. According to both scholars, overgeneralization occurs when the learners extended one rule to various grammatical forms which the rule does not apply to. Likewise, Corder (1981) elaborates that L2 learners often overgeneralize and form their own language rules in order to reduce the linguistic burden they might be facing during language production. Pertaining to the examples extracted from the learners’ written production, the learners made use of the suffix –ed for forming the past tense of the verbs. In doing so, they ruled out the restriction for forming the past tense of irregular verbs as exemplified above: “make” to “maked” and “pay” to “payed”.

Finally, the least common error made related to error is the “wrong choice of verb”. Examples of the errors are as follows.

Table 4.5 Examples of wrong choice of verb Participants’ written production Correction

(9) They did some preparations before

going to the beach made some preparations (10) They took the decision to visit the beach made the decision

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The errors made can be attributed to the “delexical nature” of the verbs “make” and “take”. Specifically, it means that the semantic load of the verb is realized by its noun pair (Boers Demecheleer & Webb, 2016). In the collocation “did some preparations” the verb “did” was assumed as synonymous to the verb “made” in that both verbs reflected the notion of producing something or producing an action (Celce-Murcia & Larsen- Freeman, 1999). Furthermore, it is also possible that the learner reflected upon his or her L1 in order to reduce the linguistic problem faced in the formation of the collocation. This is because, the learner’s mental lexicon of the Malay version of the collocation is “mengambil keputusan” (DBP Sah Bahasa, 2018) in that the verb “mengambil” can be translated to “take”. Therefore, it caused the complete translation to be “take the decision” instead of “make the decision”.