Abstract:
Interference in linguistics has a strong relation with language transfer.
Language transfer is the use of the source language (or other languages known) in
a target language context. Language transfer might cause correct or incorrect
items in target language structure. There are two types of transfer which occur in
second or foreign language development, positive transfer and negative transfer.
The aims of this research were to: (1) describe the Indonesian interference in
students’ writing of recount text at the tenth grade of SMK Negeri 1 Purworejo in
the academic year of 2016/2017; (2) find out some aspects of Indonesian that
mostly interfere students’ writing of recount text in English that is resulting in
negative transfer and making the students’ writing ungrammatically correct. The
researcher was inspired to conduct this research due to the negative transfers that
mostly happened in students’ written production in English. However, the
influence of source language (Indonesian) contributes to students’ error in writing.
The different rules of grammar in Indonesian and English don’t facilitate students
to produce sentence grammatically in English. The absence of some aspects in
Indonesian grammar is the main reason why negative transfer occurred. The result
of this research shows that there are some aspects of Indonesian grammar that
interfere the students’ writing of recount text in English. Those aspects are verb
tense, word order, articles, subject-verb agreement, and spelling. Students are still
influenced by the rule of Indonesian grammar that are mostly caused the negative
transfer in aspects of incorrect verb tense, incorrect word order, subject-verb
agreement, missing articles and spelling errors.
