Syntactic transfer among form four malay students

This study aimed to investigate the syntactic error and occurrence of syntactic transfer among Fonn Four Malay students. The objectives of this research are to determine the language errors and common syntactic errors made by Malay students in their summary writing. This study also compared and explained the occurrence of syntactic transfer produced by advanced, intermediate and low proficiency of Malay students in English summary The respondents of the study are 60 Malay students with 20 students from each of level of proficiency from Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Matang Hilir. The data for this study were collected through the Error Analysis of students' English summary writing and interview sessions with the English teacher were conducted to support the study. This research found that the main language errors produced by Malay students are pronouns, verbs, tenses and spelling errors. In addition, the common syntactic errors produced by the students are pronouns, verbs inflection, copula be, determiner, preposition, plural marking and auxiliary verbs. The syntactic errors produced by the Malay students were affected by the mother tongue influence, overgeneralization and low proficiency of the English language. The comparison of syntactic error among low, intermediate and advanced students revealed that the low students produced less errors in certain types of syntactic error as the low students were mainly lifting the word or sentences in the comprehension pmtided while writing the summar