CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

1. Education

All this time we often hear about education, educating, educated

person, and etc. The term ‘education’ is a very common and a popular word

that is uttered by many of us but understood by a very few in its right

perspective. The term of education has been presented by different experts in

different concepts. Some expert say that education refers to as acquisition of

knowledge, skills, language and attitudes. Some say that education is

practicing of people’s mind in particular direction to bring about desired

changes (Gupta/Baveja, 2014:3). Education is what survives when what has

been learned has been forgotten (B. F. Skinner, 1974).

Education plays a role in reconstructing experiences in the required

direction in order to add meaning to those experiences (Dewey, 1916). This

view implies that the child already has acquired some experiences from

his/her interaction with the environment. Education is also considered as a

process of initiation, like saying, that it is an activity rather than it is a concept

or idea. Considering education as a process of initiation into what is

considered as worthwhile for the child to learn, Peters (1959) states that

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education involves essentially certain processes which intentionally transmit

what is valuable in an intelligible and voluntary manner and creates in the

learner a desire to achieve it. Education seeks to develop the innate or the

inner potentialities of humans, as the process or activity of the humans to learn

what they never know before such as knowledge, subject, and language.

Learning is a process that is not only related to the function of school or other

organised educational settings. As an activity, education may be the task

performed by an individual in a conscious or unconscious manner and as a

process (Gupta/Baveja, 2014:72). It is regarded as a well thought activity that

is consciously imparted by various institutions including family, society,

schools, etc. For example, a day in a school. It will begin with morning prayer,

exercises, yoga, line up to enter the class, sing the National Anthem, and etc.

The processes of education include the socialisation of the child;

development of his/her personality, physical, social, emotional and cognitive

development, as well as harnessing the innate potential. These processes of

education are practised through several means and modes including the

different features, advantages, limitations, and inter-relation.

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1. Modes of Education

The ways in which education takes place or the processes are carried

out in educating the child are known as modes of education. These are

informal education, non-formal education, and formal education.

a. Informal Education

Informal education refers to the lifelong process, whereby every

individual acquires attitudes, first-language or mother tongue, values, skills

and knowledge from the educational influences and resources in his or her

own environment and from daily experience (family, neighbours, marketplace,

library, mass media, work, play, etc.). Every child, or for that matter every

human being or even animals, has a tendency to learn. Every one learns a lot

of things consciously or unconsciously through observation, experience or

imitation at home or in the surroundings, from parents, peers, family members

and the community. It is not organized (in terms of learning objectives,

learning time or learning support) and typically does not lead to certification.

Informal education takes place all the times and throughout the life of an

individual. It does not have any limit or boundaries. Therefore, people call it

as socialization that begins at home (Gupta/Baveja, 2014:79). It could happen

accidentally or incidentally, consciously or unconsciously. Education through

mass media and exposure to other experiences like exhibitions, films,

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newspapers, visits to different places, and etc. These are also constitute

informal education. Even though, tutoring at home or private tuitions are not

covered under this mode of education.

b. Non-formal Education

Language also develops within a social context and depends on social

development (Bates, 1976). Various theorists attribute importance to different

factors in the development of language. In this case, non-formal education has

a role to support the process of language development. Non-formal education

refers to any planned programme of personal and social education for people

designed to improve a range of skills and competencies, outside the formal

educational curriculum. It may not conform to the requirements of formal

educational mode but are equally important and are carried out with specific

aims and objectives (Gupta/Baveja, 2014:83). Non-formal education is a mix

of formal education and informal education in the sense that it takes place

informally in a formal environment. Non-formal education takes place both

within and outside educational institutions, and available to persons of all

ages, depending on the country contexts. It may cover educational

programmes to impart adult literacy, basic education for out of the school

children or may be development of life skills, English speaking skills, work

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skills, and etc. For example English learning/English course to improve

children’s English in speaking, reading, and writing.

Language learning commonly starts at a later stage, when language

performance has already become established and when many other physical

and mental processes of maturation are complete or nearing complete (Corder,

1993:107). The paper which started the ball rolling, so to speak, was Corder's

"The significance of learners' errors" (1967). He pointed out that the

development of generative linguistics and interest in psycholinguistic research

had initiated a shift of emphasis in language teaching from its preoccupation

with teaching towards the study of learning. The new interest led naturally to

comparison between first language (LI) and second language (L2) learning,

and to the question of whether the apparent differences between the two

represent two different processes of learning. Corder (1971) then went on to

hypothesize that some of the strategies employed by second language learners

are essentially the same as those used by children learning their first language.

And the result is the L2 learners' errors had new significance: the occurrence

of systematic errors could be taken as an indication of active participation by

the learners in the learning process, during which their ability to follow

hypotheses about the rule system of the target language (TL) might be

observed. Corder (1971) states that at any point in their learning of a TL,
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learners use a system that can be described in linguistic terms and from. He

sees the learner's interlanguage developing through successive stages of

acquisition during the learning process. This hypothesis can only be

adequately tested by longitudinal L2 cross-linguistic studies (Corder, 1967).

This system of transitional competence can be illustrated by the systematic

errors of the learners (as opposed to random mistakes). From this point of

view errors are not seen as indications of failure to learn the TL, but are

regarded positive1y, as evidence that learners are actually involved in testing

hypotheses about the linguistic system of the language being acquired.

c. Formal Education

Formal education refers to the structured education system that runs

from primary school to university, and includes specialised programmes for

technical and professional training. It is typically provided by an education or

training institution and leads to certification. It is organized (in terms, of

learning objectives, learning time, or learning support) and is intentional from

the learner’s perspective (Cedefop, 2001). The learner is registered with

institution for the period needed for the education and attends the institution

regularly. This type of education is usually being provided in schools across

the country. The progress of the learner is monitored through feedback and

assignments. The learner can interact with the teacher through correspondence
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by post or otherwise. During the learners have an interaction with their teacher

such as ask question, ask permission, and give a statement they need to speak

up. In here, the language will be needed. Most schools usually use the

language depending on where is the school established. For example, if the

school is established in Indonesia, the language for the education is Indonesia,

but the development of technology that raised the international school in

several regions. Semarang Multinational School is a school that use English

for their education because the students come from different nationalities and

mother tongues. So that it is possible that the utterances/expressions that they

produce are non-standard or not in order when they speak English. However,

we cannot call it as errors because they are in the process of mastering their

target language (English) and as the following time their target language will

approximate to standard. In this case, this process is called as interlanguage

(IL). It appears because they are still kid and let alone they are Indonesians.

Besides, there are several factors that interfere their interlanguage English.

2. Interlanguage

The term interlanguage was first introduced into the literature by

Selinker (1972), in an influential paper published in the International Review

of Applied Liguistics in 1972. Since then, various terms have been used
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synonymously with interlanguage, although there are some subtle differences

between them: approximative systems, Nemser (1969); idiosyncratic dialects,

Corder (1971); learner language systems, Richards and Sampson (1973). All

these descriptions have one thing in common: the fact that second language

learning is seen to be moving in the direction of the target language, with the

learner constructing successive systems of phonological, grammatical, and

semantic usage rules. Selinker (1972) believes that the evidence for

interlanguage can be found in what he calls "fossilizations", that is,

phonological, morphological and syntactic features in the speech of L2

speakers that are different from the TL rules even after years of instruction in,

and exposure to, the TL. Fossilizations are also described as those features

which, "though absent from the speech of learners under normal conditions,

tend to reappear in their performances when they are forced to deal with

difficult material, when either anxious or in an extremely re1axed state"

(Selinker 1972:215). This kind of regression is seen as systematic, and it is

considered as evidence for the psychological reality of fossilizations and

interlanguages. It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that the persistence

of fossilized forms could well indicate that the interlanguage of a speaker who

displays this kind of regression is still limited to relatively simple acts of

communication. The development of interlanguage to facilitate the use of

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more complex syntatic structures may not take place until its function is

extended to such integrative and expressive uses as affirmation of social

identity and expression of psychological need. Interlanguage theory ( Selinker,

1972) proposes that second language learners produce their own self-

contained system that falls somewhere between the L1 and the L2 systems.

3. Error and Language Interference

Error, always a central concern in language teaching, became the

central concern in audio-lingual approaches. Collections of frequently

occurring errors (for example, French 1949) already existed. Traditional

textbooks had long paid attention to what were felt to be the errors most likely

to occur and tried to guard learners from particular pitfalls in phonology,

morphology, syntax and lexis. These areas of special difficulty might derive

either from intralingual or interlingual factors. At the lexical level, for

example, intralingual difficulties were mooted where minimal formal

differences in the foreign language involved major semantic differences (for

example “peel” and “pill”). Interlingual lexical difficulties were mooted

typically when a form in the foreign language was very similar to a form in

the learner’s native language, but the meaning was different.

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It was the British applied linguist, Pit Corder, who re-focused attention

on error from the perspective of language processing and language

acquisition. In his seminal (1967) paper “The significance of learners’ errors”

he stressed the learner’s positive cognitive contribution to learning. His view

was that the learner is engaged in a process of discovering the language. The

learner forms hypotheses based on language input and tests those hypotheses

in speech production. In this view errors are not only an inevitable but also,

very importantly, a necessary feature of learner language, without which

improvement cannot occur. Corder coined the term “transitional competence”

to indicate the essential dynamism and flux of the language learner’s evolving

system. A learner’s errors, according to Corder (1967), represent the

discrepancy between the transitional competence of that learner and the target

language. Drawing heavily on Chomsky’s (1965) view of first language

acquisition, he suggested that just as for the child acquiring its mother tongue

the language evolves in a more or less fixed pattern, so the foreign language

learner may possess an “inbuilt syllabus” which determines the order in which

the language system is acquired and which is largely independent of the order

of the external syllabus according to which the classroom learner is ostensibly

learning. Corder further suggested that studying error might supply clues to

this inbuilt order of acquisition, persistent errors indicating those elements

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acquired late. Corder, however, invoked Chomsky’s (1965) distinction

between “competence” and performance” to draw a distinction between true

errors of competence and errors of performance, which he denoted as mere

“mistakes”, the product of “chance circumstances” analogous to slips of the

tongue in the native language (Corder 1967: 166). These performance

“mistakes”, he maintained, say nothing about the underlying speaker

competence and should therefore be excluded from analysis. In a later paper

Corder (1971: 107-108) suggested that error analysis should include not only

“overt” errors but “covert” errors. Covert errors, unlike overt errors, are

formally acceptable but do not express the meaning intended by the learner.

For example, “I want to know the English” is a formally correct sentence, but

it would be a covert error if the learner wanted to express the meaning carried

by “I want to know English”. The procedure for error analysis was elaborated

by Corder (1974) as comprising five stages:

• selection of a corpus of language

• identification of errors in the corpus

• classification of the errors identified

• explanation of the psycholinguistic causes of the errors

• evaluation (error gravity ranking) of the errors

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In fact, error analysis has turned out to be more problematic than one

might expect for various reasons. There are problems of identification.

Notwithstanding native-speaker intuitions, error is difficult to define and can

by no means always be unambiguously identified in production

(Hughes/Lascaratou, 1982). The distinction between “errors” and “mistakes”

is highly problematic since in performance correct and incorrect forms of a

single target often occur side by side. Learner transitional competence has

been found to be highly variable, influenced by various external factors such

as situation, interlocutor, speech versus writing, and certain internal factors,

especially anxiety. Furthermore, there appears to be a middle ground between

completely acceptable language and erroneous language, which may variously

be judged as infelicitous, stylistically inappropriate, non-native like, obscure

(Azevedo, 1980; Pawley/Syder, 1983).

There are problems of classification. Classification of errors depends

on error’s location to the domains of phonology/graphology, morphology,

syntax, lexis, discourse. For example “The doctor is white” for “The doctor’s

coat is white”, “Miss, Clifton bad” for “Miss, Clifton is bad”, “Holy water

spread spread” for “the holy water is spread over”, “She have more candy

inside her bag” for “She has more of candies in her bag” which are difficult to

localize to a specific item and seem to extend over the whole sentence.
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4. Factors of Interlanguage

There are several universal influences that help develop the nature,

pace, route and finish line in the path towards learning a second language or

approximate the target language. SLA has found the most important and well-

studied sources of universal influence are age, mother tongue, environment

and cognition. These universal influences mutually interact and give an impact

on the internal processor system and the language learner. It evokes whenever

learners speak, read, interact, write, negotiate and express themselves in their

target language/L2.

a. Age

The terms ‘critical period’ and ‘sensitive period’ are discussed as

essentially synonymous. This is probably because the available evidence with

regard to the acquisition of an additional language is still too preliminary for

SLA researchers to be in a position to make perfect distinctions between the

two notions (Ortega, 2009). Children acquiring their first language complete

the feat within a biological window of four to six years of age. During their

first year of life they learn to handle one-word utterances. During the second

year, two-word utterances and exponential vocabulary growth occur. The third

year of life is characterized by syntactic and morphological deployment. Some

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more pragmatically or syntactically subtle phenomena are learned by five or

six years of age. After that, many more aspects of mature language use are

tackled when children are taught how to read and write in school. Besides, if

the children went to international school for their study. They will learn the

2nd, 3rd, 4th, and . . . . language earlier. And as the result, in a seminal article,

Krashen, Long, and Scarcella (1979) put a grain of salt on these findings.

They concluded that older is better initially, but that younger is better in the

long run.

b. Cross-linguistics Influences

Cross-linguistic influences in the area of pragmatic competence offers

a good illustration of this point. Sometimes the L1 influence on L2 pragmatic

choices is obvious and rather local. Another area which illustrates how L1

influences can cut across layers of language pertains to the semantic-

functional ways of expressing thought or what first language acquisition

researcher Slobin (1996) calls thinking-for-speaking. This refers to the fact

that languages offer specific sets of resources to frame meaning, or to

schematize experience, and speakers are known to be constrained by such

language-specific ways at the time when they are putting together their

thoughts into language. Slobin (1996) suggests that thinking-for-speaking in a

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L1 will be transferred into the new language by L2 learners and, furthermore,

that they may never be able to restructure their L1-acquired ways of thinking

for speaking when using an L2.

c. Development of Learner Language

Competence refers to the nature of the mental representations

comprising the internal grammar of learners and development refers to the

processes and mechanisms by which those representations and the ability to

use them change over time (Ortega, 2009). The realization of the first tradition

in the study of learner language can be situated in the coinage of the technical

term interlanguage (IL) (Selinker, 1972), which refers to the language system

that each learner constructs at any given point in development. On the other

hand, the school of Chomskyan linguistics finally made substantive inroads

into SLA. As a result, researchers began to take seriously the possibility that

an innate Universal Grammar (UG) would constrain L2 acquisition, as it was

believed to constrain L1 acquisition. Since then, SLA researchers with training

in formal linguistics have also pursued the study of the mental representations

of grammar that learners build, with the aim to describe the universal and

innate bounds of such knowledge (White, 2003). By contrast, interlanguage

researchers believe that the same general cognitive learning mechanisms that
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help humans learn and process any other type of information help them extract

regularities and rules from the linguistic data available in the surrounding

environment.

d. The linguistic environment

Languages are almost constantly learned with and for others, and these

others provide linguistic evidence that circles learners. Knowing about a

language benefits afforded by the environment is thus important for achieving

a good understanding of how people learn 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and fifth languages. The

environment affords learners input, or linguistic data produced by other

competent users of the L2. Krashen (1970) at the University of Southern

California formally proposed a central role in L2 learning for input in his

Comprehensible Input Hypothesis (best formulated in Krashen, 1985). The

most important source of L2 learning is comprehensible input, or language

which learners process for meaning and which contains something to be

learned. When L2 learners process these messages for meaning (which they

will most likely do if the content is personally relevant, and provided they can

reasonably understand them), grammar learning will naturally occur. Such as

the children who are in the process of mastering their target language

(English), if they placed in the environment that forced them to use English
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for their daily activity and the input is comprehensive, such as at school, they

may approximate their English to standard.

e. Cognition

Cognition refers to how information is processed and learned by the

human mind (Ortega, 2009). A word is established in long-term memory when

the link between a form and its meaning is made. Vocabulary knowledge

concerns the relative ability to use a given word productively or only

recognize it passively, it depends on the learners. The size of the mental

lexicon, which refers to the total number of words known and represented in

long-term memory. Size is often related to the relative frequency with which

words come across in the input that surrounds learners, since high-frequency

words usually make it into long-term memory earlier in the learning process

than low-frequency words. For L2 learners, new vocabulary presents a

challenge. They need to learn about 3,000 new words in order to minimally

follow conversations in the L2, and about 9,000 new word families if they

want to be able to read novels, story book or newspapers in the L2 (Nation,

2006). Children who start their school in an international school may discover

new vocabularies in their activities such as when they play with their friends,
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have a talk with their teacher, their assembly, excursion, and etc. The new

vocabularies can enrich their cognition to each experience.

f. Mother tongue or native language

The native language can be used for fluent and proficient social

speech; however it is not sufficient to mediate higher-level cognition. The

native language is essential for regulating advanced cognition because

producing language in the L2 requires significant attentional resources.

Negueruela and Lantolf (2006) also support the importance of the L1 in SLA.

The study was based on understanding two different types of past

constructions in Spanish: the past preterit, which describes something specific

that happened in the past at a specific time, and the past imperfect, which

describes things that happened repeatedly in the past. When the children

discovered a new vocabulary for each experience, they will use the vocabulary

to the same experience without think about the specific time of the experience.

They only think about how to communicate with others using those words.