Mother Tongue Interference on EFL: The Case of English Department Students in Udayana University

                       During the EFL process, learners often come across difficulties. These difficulties might caused by differences between their mother tongue (L1) and the foreign language (L2).  This is reflected through errors found in production of L2 by the learners. The errors are observable in areas of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. These errors commonly referred to as mother tongue interference. There are studies which show that the errors can be referred back to the mother tongue. This study aimed at analyzing the influence of mother tongue onto English produced by the students of English Department in Udayana University. Corpus for this research were 60 narrative essays written by second semester students enrolled in Writing subject and whose mother tongue is Balinese; out of the corpus 40 essays were used as sample. The data were analyzed by using error analysis (EA) method to see the influence of L1, specifically on the morphological and syntactic errors. Morphological errors refer to constant mistake related to word formation; while syntactic errors refer to sentence formation, including the subject verb agreement, use of tenses, active and passive construction, articles and preposition. Most of errors found were on the area of subject verb agreement, followed by the use of articles. The errors demonstrate that differences between Balinese and English influence and causes interference on the learners’ writings.