The Interlanguage of Indonesian Young Learner of English: A Case Study on an Indonesian Bilingual School Kindergarten Student’s English Speaking Acquisition

Abstract

The main research question in this study is a descriptive one: How does a bilingual student negotiate meanings in a casual conversation? The object of this study is an Indonesian kindergarten student of bilingual school -- Mondial Education. The student learns three hours a day at school with English as a medium of instruction. To reach the goal, the student’s expressions were recorded and transcribed based on turns. The transcription was then analyzed and interpreted. The findings suggest that the investigated learner’s utterances are not identical to the corresponding utterances which would have been produced by a native speaker of the target language had attempted to express the same meanings as the learner. The learner’s language has its own characteristic that is, the learner’s form of target language norm which is not random or toward the learner’s native language, but toward the interlanguage norm of the language learner’s norm. Some areas of knowledge of language functions are likely acquired by the learner in spite of a number of errors.