Transfer, Interference and Overgeneralization by Ida Mariani Idris

A.    Introduction

The issue right now is about first language (L1) acquisition can influence on the second language (L2) performance. The existence of some errors from L1 to the L2 may appear if we are trying to analyze it carefully. The errors are coming from the utterance itself when it is transferred in the negative way. The possible problem here is that we sometimes find errors in the second language learning process because the influences from the mother tongue.

Therefore, it is interesting to discuss how L1 influence on the L2 performance since it deals with the errors to transfer the language itself. 

B.     Discussion

According to Brown (1990: 90, Paragraph 2), transfer isto carry overthe previous performance or knowledge to the subsequent learning. It is said that we make two things in transferring the language. They are positive transfer and negative transfer. Positive transfer is about carrying over everything when it is going to be right. Otherwise, if we make negative transfer, we are going to find something called interference and overgeneralization. Krashen (2002: 7, Paragraph 4) explained that interference isas a caused of performer that is “falling back” on old knowledge because he or she didn’t acquire enough the L2. It is clear that this kind of errors can occur to the learners because there is an influence on their L1.In addition, Brown (1990: 91, Paragraph 2) explained that in the L2performance, the generalizing of language can occur to the particular rule or item as the target language that is called overgeneralization.The example byLeaver, Ehrman and Shekhtman(2005: 148, Paragraph 2) explained that we can say one sheep, five sheep, few deer, many deer instead of sayingfive sheepsor many deers. It is a common mistake toover generalizethe common rule of adding -s to make plural to all categories of nouns.

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Competence and Performance and Imitation

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

Competence is the ability to produce an unlimited number of sentences with the knowledge of limited number of grammatical rules. Competence consists of the knowledge of language user in principle has. Performance is imperfect manifestation of competence. Performance is the result of the psychological process that employs this knowledge in producing or interpreting language utterance. Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes  'competence' as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual utterances.   In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without assessing performance.  

Why is it important to make a distinction between competence and performance?

Noting the distinction between competence and performance is useful primarily because it allows those studying a language to differentiate between a speech error and not knowing something about the language. To understand this distinction, it is helpful to think about a time when you've made some sort of error in your speech. For example, let's say you are a native speaker of English and utter the following:

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Starting Point

A thousand miles of journey must begin with a single step.

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