The Vietnamese-English language contact at the current stage certainly has both positive and negative effects on Vietnamese and otherwise. This may stem from subjective and objective causes in the process of language contact [1]. Considering language changes requires systematic research investment to fully discover those effects. As second language learners, Vietnamese students face many difficulties and obstacles in learning English as other SLA learners. In learning, learners need to master language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) and language components (grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary). Successful learners must develop competence in the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon of a non-native tongue.

The language transfer phenomenon of the mother tongue is inevitable. Language transfer can be defined as learners' efforts to make use of their previous L1 knowledge [2]. Odlin [3] presented that language transfer is not simply a consequence of habit formation. It is neither simply interference because much of the influence of the native language can be very helpful. Merilainen (20210) defines language transfer as the influence of the learner’s mother tongue on the acquisition of a second language.   

Although language transfer can be positive or negative, language interference is most often discussed as a source of errors known as negative transfer, which occurs when learners apply the knowledge and skills of their native to the second language [4]. Negative transfer is also shown in such various activities as listening, speaking, reading, writing. In writing, there are several language aspects, such as grammar, spell-check, punctuation, and so on. Apart from differences in grammar and vocabulary, there are issues of the letter, word, and text formation, manifested by handwriting, spelling, and layout and punctuations [5]. It is difficult to learn  writing  because  learners should employ a process that comprises planning, organizing, and revising to present meaning in words form. From all the above problems, I had perspectives to find solutions to the problems in teaching English writing to non-major students at school. Moreover, based on theories of language acquisition, the writer analyzes the mistakes of learners in the process of second language acquisition and search for reasonable strategies to improve the quality of students’ writing.

Literature Review

To communicate in a foreign language, learners need to have basic knowledge of the language and communication skills, which are often divided into 4skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. These two areas of knowledge and skills are like the tip of the iceberg, studied and described by J. Cummins in his Iceberg Theory. Chomsky explained the development of language skills by the innate language acquisition device (innate language acquisition device) based on the universal grammar. Muriel Saville-Troike and Karen Barto [6] in "Introducing Second Language Acquisition" argued that two important things are linguistic competence and language performance. 

In the process of language acquisition, the phenomenon of language interference occurs during the individual use of two languages, plays an important role in learners' acquisition, and causes language errors. According to Lightbrown and Nina Spada [7], some factors influence the success of foreign language learners, including context and social experience, the relationship between first and second languages; some less important factors are the age of learners, language aptitude, learning motivation, and quality of teaching-learning. “Transfer is the impact has caused by the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language which has been acquired” [8]. Brown [7] stated that transfer is a general term describing the carryover of previous performance or knowledge to subsequent learning. Negative transfer occurs when a previous performance disrupts the performance of a second task. Muriel Saville-Troike [6] stated that negative transfer (or interference), when an L1 structure or rule is used in an L2 utterance and that use is inappropriate and considered an “error”. Negative transfer of L1 features can often be inferred from forms in the second language that is unlike any that are likely to be produced by a native speaker of the L2 or are an integration of elements that would not occur in monolingual speech. 

Learning a foreign language is capturing a new system of habits., the habits of using the mother tongue have influenced the foreign language. In recent years, many researchers have found that many students who are in the low level of the second language extremely depend on the mother tongue [9] which always leads to negative or positive transfer; to the middle-level students, the negative transfer is especially obvious. This is the phenomenon of transferring the knowledge and skills of using the mother tongue into learning a foreign language. It makes learning a foreign language easier because there are similarities between the mother tongue and the foreign language to learn. The phenomenon of positive displacement manifests itself in all linguistic aspects and non-linguistic aspects, such as writing and culture. This is a phenomenon that often hinders and slows down the learning process because of inappropriate application of means, structures, and rules in the mother tongue to learning a foreign language, making the use of that language incorrect. 

Cross-linguistic influence occurs at all levels of IL: vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and all other aspects of language structure and use. Interference at the grammatical level is illustrated in the following utterances made by learners of English L2, which a native English speaker would be unlikely to produce [6]. Grammatical interference means that the L1's grammatical patterns are negatively transferred. Therefore, in this study, grammatical interference is a grammatical error that is caused by the negative transfer of the structure of L1, Vietnamese, to the second language, English. Dulay, Burt, and Krashen [10] supposed that there are four types in which learners “modify” target forms: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. 

First, omission happens when a learner omits grammatically correct items that must appear in a well-performed sentence, so the learner is doing an omission error. This results from negative transfer from L1 because maybe there are no similar structures in his/her native language. For example, learners usually omit grammatical words such as noun and verb inflection (-s, -ed, -ing), the article (a, an, the), verb auxiliaries (is, are, can…), preposition much more occasionally than a content word (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, and adverb) such as in Peter new teacher, he speaks English well; we eating breakfast, and so on.

Second, items that should not appear in a well-performed utterance characterizes addition errors. The addition comprises regularization, double markings, and simple addition. Example: we didn't go there, bought food in the supermarket, he can to go home late tonight. 

Third, misformation includes regularization (e.g. told, gone, peoples), archiforms (this, that, these, those, only use one word: that), and alternating forms (e.g. I gone to school yesterday)

Finally, misordering errors are caused by the incorrect placement of a morpheme in an utterance. For instance: what you are doing now? I don’t think where is he.   

In short, language interference is an inevitable phenomenon in teaching and learning foreign languages. It is considered as the interfering effects of the native language on the target (the second) language. Brown suggested it is clear from learning theory that a person will use whatever previous experience he or she has had with language to facilitate the second language learning process. Therefore, to improve the effectiveness of foreign language teaching and learning, teachers need to compare and contrast to clarify the similarities and differences between the two languages ​​in the teaching process. This helps students avoid common mistakes in acquiring a second language. 

Search Questions

The research aims to answer the following research questions:

• What is the grammatical interference performed by non-major students at the University of transport and communication in their writing compositions?

• What are the solutions which should be put forward to help non-major students at the University of transport and communication avoid the negative transfer in writing?

The research aims at describing types of grammatical interference made by non-major students in the university of transport and communication in writing an English text and suggesting some solutions to avoid the negative transfer. Therefore, the corpus from the non-major students’ writing compositions was collected. The writer then identified the wrong sentences or phrases and classified those into four types: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. After that, the writer provided some solutions to avoid the negative transfer. 

Finding And Discussion

The students were required to write a text. There were totally 50 compositions. The author checked all the compositions carefully and then identified the wrong sentences or phrases found in the text. The researcher classified these errors into four kinds: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering, presented as follows.

Omission

Omissions Of “to be” The Main Verb: In Vietnamese, it is acceptable to write Cô ấy đẹp quá rather than cô ấy thì đẹp quá. In English, the sentences which are grammatically correct must have the verb "to be". The omission in writing the correct to be is the negative transfer because the learners have perception in Vietnamese. Moreover, some students don't sometimes pay attention to the agreement of subject and verb. 

Son Tung MTP my favorite singer.

I very happy when I got a letter from you.

Shopping also very difficult in the Covid-19 pandemic. 

People here is very friendly.

There's a lot of interesting places that I want you to come to.

Omission of –s Noun In Plural Form

Plural form of a noun in Vietnamese is indicated by “nhiều, rất nhiều, nhiều lắm, đông, etc”. In English, plural form for a noun is used by adding "s, es" ending (except for some special cases: -en in children, oxen, no adding: s, es after "deer, sheep"). The students based on previous knowledge in Vietnamese to write English sentences, for example:

• My country has many famous tourist place to visit such as Ha Long Bay, Sapa, Hoi An...

• There are many delicious dish in our city

• My country is very beautiful with lots of scenic spot such as Phong Nha cave, Nha Trang…

• You will go to the Old Town, full of winding lane and Chinese-styled shop

• There are a lot of farms with different kind of colorful flowers

Omission of Auxiliary

In Vietnamese, auxiliary does not exist so the students, while the function of auxiliary in English is to modify main verbs in the sentence. Therefore, the students often fail in composing grammatically correct sentence as follows:

• I reading a book now

• I not like this film

• I watching TV at the moment

Addition

Addition Of to Be

The students often make errors in overusing the verb, so they use double verbs in the same sentence.

He is go to school by bus.

I was slept to bed late last night.

We were saw that film last week

Many people was moved to the country because they like fresh air.

Addition of –ing Verb After Modal Verbs:

The students translated word-to-word when expressing their native ideas into English:

• Because I can having dinner with your family, I am really happy

• My brother and I will going to the supermarket

Misformation

Misformation of Present and Past Verbs: Tenses in English depend on the time of speaking. As a result, verbs in English come in three tenses: past, present, and future. There are no tenses in Vietnamese, so this difference results in the negative transfer, such as:

• They didn’t know where he is.

• Last night I watch TV with my brother.

• Yesterday I go to the cinema with my friends.

• The program begin at 6 p.m. 

Misformation of Quantifier: Many, Much, Few, Little

‘Much’ is used when we are speaking about a singular noun. ‘Many’ is used when we are speaking about a plural noun. Countable nouns can be used with a number and have singular and plural forms. Uncountable nouns can only be used in singular and cannot be used with a number. ‘Much’ and ‘many’ are often used with questions and negative clauses. For example:

• “I don’t have many friends.” 

• “How much money did you spend last night?”

In Vietnamese, the speaker only adds some quantity words before noun such as: nhiều, rất nhiều, những, các, mớ, bầy, đàn, Therefore, they will transfer directly into many and much but they don’t focus on putting –s, -es ending the noun. For example:

• I have been to Ha Noi many time

• There are many interesting places in Da Lat

• Sometimes they don’t recognize countable nouns and uncountable nouns, so they cannot use much or many correctly

• We didn’t have many time to finish the plan

• They have many money, so they travel around the world

Misformation of –er, more- in Comparative

In English, -er and more- are used to show the comparison of the adjectives and adverbs. However, it is only used the word “hơn” to show comparative in Vietnamese. Therefore, the students often perform negative transfer because they don’t recognize when to use –er or more. For example:

• The mini-market is more cheaper and fresher supermarket so sometimes I buy food here

• She felt more healthy than before

• This village is more quiet than my village

Misordering

Misordering of Noun Phrase       

In Vietnamese, the students create noun phrases by putting adjective after the noun, such as in the sentence: Nó là cậu bé thông minh. “thông minh” is an adjective to help the noun “cậu bé”. In writing in English, they usually make errors in ordering the adjectives explaining the noun, such as

• I feel happy when I cook food delicious by myself

• I usually eat food energy-rich such as rice, meat braised, fish fried….

• My mom is a chef excellent

• I will cook for you a meal special

Some Solutions to Avoid the Negative Transfer

Vietnamese non-major students who learn English transfer their previous system of grammar into their new language system - English. As a result, the writer proposes the following solutions to help second language learners avoid the negative transfer. 

Grasp Basic Grammar Knowledge

To build a good composition, the students need to understand basic grammar in the textbook and then practice the formation by doing lots of exercises that help them overcome errors in using tenses, structures, sentences, words, punctuation, and spelling. Students should learn from simple to complex knowledge carefully. Whenever you are unsure about the usage of a word, phrase, or punctuation, check it out in your grammar book or look it up in a dictionary so that you can use it correctly.Read Writing Samples and English BooksGetting into the habit of reading in your spare time is essential, but remember that you should read intensively. This reading will help us learn words, sentence structure and expressions and writing styles in English so that, to some extent, you can strengthen your knowledge of culture. This way we will find it easier to express ourselves and get rid of the habit of translating word by word. Motivating students to Learn and Think in EnglishTeachers should motivate the learners to express their ideas and address them to their writing. They must choose sentence structures that are acceptable in English.  This helps students avoid word-to-word translation in their writing. Making Contrastive Analysis between English and VietnameseWhen comparing the difference between Vietnamese and English, the students can avoid the negative transfer because they are aware of avoiding errors in writing. The teachers will analyze these differences first and model for their students. Rewriting their Compositions after the Teachers’ FeedbackMost students do not rewrite their writing after being corrected and commented on by the teacher. They just skim through those mistakes without rewriting their writing. Rewriting is also an effective way to reduce errors and add new ideas that students may not have come up with in the first draft. Moreover, students will find it easier because the teacher has underlined the mistakes clearly. The student's strengths and weaknesses have been pointed out so they can correct them. Students can adjust and supplement their rewriting both in terms of grammar and the content will help them develop their writing skills and build confidence when writing later.

Generally, students make errors in English grammar because of their previous perception and knowledge of Vietnamese. There are four types of grammatical interference presented above: addition, omission, misformation, misordering in most students’ writing compositions. It is very necessary to propose some solutions to help learners avoid the negative transfer in learning, especially in second language learning.

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