Interlanguage of Fourth Year High School Students

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION

Language plays an important role in human life. One tries to acquire, learn and use language as a means of communication, and simultaneously as social symbol of humanity. By using language someone could make statements, convey facts and knowledge , explain or report something, and keep social relations among the language users. These indicate that by means of language, people can express their ideas, feeling, information etc through communication.
English is a language which has great reach and influence; it is taught all over the world under many different circumstances. Since this is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "world language", the lingua franca of the modern era, and while it is not an official language in most countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language.
The Philippine-American connection has undergone considerable changes since then. Today, English - the means the Americans used to teach us via the mass media, the arts, social, business and political interaction - continues to be a strong thread that binds the two nations.
The low levels of English proficiency among high school students nowadays becoming a hot issue among academic thinkers. This is because the students’ English language skills are not being developed. There are times that students have no confident when using English or the negative attitude towards the English language and also like the limited opportunities to use English outside the classroom. Most learners have lack of confidence when using English language. For example, the person that has low self-confidence may refuse to use the language in publics. Anna Freud once said “I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.” This shown that confident levels are decreasing when the learners are lack of self-confidence to use this language. They are afraid to be wrong and prejudiced about it.
Another reason is the negative attitudes towards the English language. For information, attitude has been defined as the inclination to act or to be in a state of ‘readiness’ to act (Gagne, 1985). The learners just learnt English to pass the examination not using it as their second language. Students generally find it difficult to maintain their interest in English language learning as English is not seen as important for their immediate needs other than to pass their examination.
English is also most widely used in communicating around the world. The information that the researchers gathered about communication and English made them realized that the two terminologies must be always together. Good communication creates a good ambience and relationship between everyone in every organization most especially if it is inside a business while English is now required in every company; as according to Ms. Bambina Buenaventura, language is now considered a skill, in fact, big companies, both here and abroad, are now looking for good English communication skills among potential employees, sadly, these companies are disappointed. Sad to say that the students nowadays are not practicing effective communication; some really don’t want to practice it and some are practicing it in the most improper way in the form of the so-called “taglish”, a combination of Filipino and English words in one sentence. Those who can afford to enroll in college will be privileged to learn and be trained more with their communication skills, but what about those students who cannot afford to be upgraded in tertiary level? Of course they’ll apply for a job to make a living, but the problem is, even the few available jobs for high school graduates require good communication skills, and unfortunately, as the researchers have noticed, most high school students are not prepared for this kind of challenge. Some of the students are good in written communication but not that good when it comes to oral because some are shy to let others hear their English, or afraid to execute a wrong grammar or bad sentence.
Errors are the systematic and regular mistakes committed by the second language learners at competence level due to linguistic reason. Every second language learner commits errors at any level or area of language. At the basic level, if the teacher makes corrections on the student's writing, the page may even be covered with red blots. And this is where, some teachers think, the real problem begins. Nevertheless, this is not a problem actually but a part of solution. To commit errors is often a first step towards learning the correct form since those errors indicate the sign of successive learning in any course of instruction. The making of errors is a strategy employed by children in learning a new thing (here, a second language). If they are made aware of such errors, it serves as a feedback for the language learners. The study of errors is imperative for the language teachers too to know how much the learners have learned and consequently what remains for them to learn. http://www.scribd.com/doc/22397658/Thesis-on-Error-Analysis-by-Rebat-Dhakal
Dodge (1973:48) stresses, “To succeed in any college work, a student must learn to write clearly and correctly. He must begin by working to achieve mastery of spelling and understanding of sentence structure. He must learn to understand the difference between the informal usage of dormitory conversation and relatively formal usage of written English. He must learn to organize and develop his ideas in logical order, in effective paragraphs, and in complete essays and reports. If he does things, then whether he goes on to practice engineering or law, to teach history or chemistry, to manage a home or a business – he will have the skill required of every educated man or woman. ”

Students in the tertiary level are expected to use English language well . An important part of education is learning to make the words for them. According to Kitzhaber (19880): “The extent that a student develops a fuller awareness of the nature of language, of its resources and limitations, it is possible that he might acquire a somewhat firmer and more discriminating command of the English tongue. And that is what training in English composition is supposed to foster.” This study was undertaken to determine the writing and skills they commit in grammar in their reports submitted as requirements in their subjects. This study on error analysis may not only reveal the weaknesses of the students but also give some suggestions to improve language learning. Analysis of errors can be the most important source of information about the nature of the learner’s knowledge. It can provide information on the content that can be included in the syllabus or the programme of teaching. Learner’s errors are viewed as an important factor in language learning. They are now seen as the effect of certain strategies put into operation by the learner
In this attempt to master the intricacies of the second language. In effect, this will suggest to the teacher the appropriate teaching techniques that will “reinforce to productive learning strategies and extinguish the undesirable ones.”