As language learners, we must have encountered some problems on learning a new language. Just imagine, when you are speaking, are you sure that you use the language appropriately? Probably you aren’t. In contrast, we frequently find that most of the students (even language learners) are stuck whenever they are asked to speak (don’t be mad guys, it’s true for sure!). What’s the matter? It might be because the nature of speaking which consists of complex range of language sub-skills. Let’s say that those sub-skills, mainly used in communication, are vocabulary mastery, pronunciation, and grammar. Among those three which one do you think the most difficult? I think all of you would agree with me that grammar turns out to be the most difficult to use in speaking. A student is asking to his friend “hey mate, I came to your house yesterday but you weren’t at home, where were you? Another student in reply says “I’m going’ to Doni’s house” is an example of how grammar is used in speaking. There is a student who might possess a good sentence with appropriate use of grammar in his utterances while another might not. In another occasion it might be worse when the problems in grammar sometimes create communicative problems to some of the students. While speaking, some of the students might speak in a lot of pauses and posses ungrammatical sentence in their utterances because grammar interfere their mind when they are trying to speak. The result on my research, in which the data was obtained from the English students who participated in speaking III classes, shows how grammar becomes one of the communicative problems in speaking. Most of the students failed to appropriately use some features of English grammar in their spoken utterances. There are some patterns of grammatical errors occurring in student’s spoken utterances and each of the students has different grammatical problems.
In tenses, the problems are due to tense-shifting. The students mostly use inappropriate tenses or even mix-up the tenses when they are talking about an event in certain time-lines (be consistent guys!). For example, the student A often uses simple present-tense although he/she is asked to tell about something related to the past. i.e. “Where did you spend your vacation (lecturer)?” last year I go to Bali with my sisters (student respond).” In another case, the problems on the use of verbs are mainly caused by omission and addition of be verbs. It is because –be verbs are often treated as the general marker both in simple present tense and past tense. i.e. ‘I was* work as a ticketing staff in Batam.” The problems on verb errors might also be caused by subject-verb agreement. In English the verbs must agree with the subject (for example, third person singular person requires the inflectional –s/es/ies added at the end of the verbs or is/was as the -be verbs). The errors on word-choices might also turn out to be the problems in spoken utterances. It comes as a result of having lack of vocabularies. Students frequently ignore the meaning of the words when they are speaking (it is not the way out guys!) Memorizing a lot of vocabularies is not the best strategy to overcome this problem for the errors on word choices might only be caused of the faulty of differentiating adjectives and adverbs even though some of them are caused by inappropriate expression of the words (example; I work as usually*, diplomat is all about international relationship*, etc.)
Why those errors occur? The errors have several reasons of their occurrence. The first is ignorance. In this stage, the students often create their own rules instead of using the rules which exist in a language. They tend to over simplify the rules in a language (examples: omission of be verbs, incorrect main verbs; my name [-] Anton, I searching some documents, etc). Don’t do it guys because the ignorance, in a language, would result in the bad habit. The second reason is caused by what so called first language interference. The different grammatical system between Indonesian and English is the best example in this viewpoint. The example of first language interference is the problem in tenses. In Indonesia, the time-line is marked by time marker (kemarin, sekarang, besok). However, it is different in English because English has many kinds of tenses as the great deals when we want to talk about something related to certain time-lines. The third is translation. It seems to be the most common sources of errors produced by students. It usually occurs as the result of a situation when students are asked to communicate but they sometimes do not know an appropriate expression within their utterances.
