Indonesian learners’ problems in acquiring English grammatical morphology

This is a study of the grammatical morphology of English, with the research focus on the problems of the past -ed marker (lexical morpheme), the verb phrase marker (intra-phrasal morpheme), and the 3sg –s marker (inter-phrasal morpheme) used by the Indonesian learners of English as a second language. This study involved 40 participants from Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The data collection was carried out at two different points in time with a four-month interval. A corpus tagger software was used to analyze the corpora—a total of 69,575 words—produced by the the participants in two different writing conditions: timed writing and planned writing. Results indicated that the past -ed marker is the type of morpheme with the least occurrences of errors, while the 3sg -s marker is the morpheme that appears to be the biggest problem for the L2 learners. The findings also revealed very small progress from Time 1 to Time 2; the relatively short time span appears to have an effect on the insignificant development of the grammatical morphemes. It is concluded that the acquisition of the English grammatical morphemes is not sensitive to the context of different writing tasks.