LANGUAGE INTERFERENCE OF CHINESE STUDENTS (L1) INTO ENGLISH WRITTEN TEXTS (L2) IN MEDAN

This paper is aimed at investigating and describing the interference of Chinese Language (L1) students into written English texts (L2). The present study is limited to syntactic interference, such as lexical, phonological, and discourse interference. Qualitative data was collected from ten Chinese students. The data were analyzed by Miles, Huberman, and Saldana’s theory. The findings showed eight syntactic interferences occur in the English texts, for instance, the syntactic interference on parts of speech (noun, adjective, verb), tenses, pronouns, auxiliaries, articles (definite and indefinite), nouns indicating possession, noun plurality, and on impersonal ‘there’ as sentence subject. The interferences are found either in the L1 rule which is applied in L2 or in the deviation of L2 as its non-existence in L1.