This study examined the issue of transfer for English as a Second Language (ESL) students at the elementary level. The kinds of errors made by 140 students were classified and presented. By using qualitative analysis, the data showed that the errors could be classified into nine parts. These covered the use of the root or simple present form, -ed overgeneralization, spoken target-like form, to "be" omission, "did" overgeneralization, the use of "be" and the simple past or the "ing" form, blended forms, misselection, and irregular simple past overgeneralization. However, the data showed that in the use of blended forms learners tend to use the irregular simple past and an "s" ending for third-person singular subjects in the simple present. Moreover, learners tend to avoid using the verb "to be" in the simple past. Therefore, the main result indicated that negative transfer or interference happened at a syntactic level, particularly in the use of the simple past tense, from Indonesian as a first language (L1) to English as a second language (L2). In conclusion, in second language acquisition (SLA), interference occurred at sentence level produced by elementary students, especially in the use of the simple past tense. Eventually transfer in the use of the simple past tense was seen as a learning strategy in acquiring English.

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Todays semantic preference and semantic prosody are two notions that many scholars have been carefully studied in the field of corpus linguistics as corpora have become larger in size, and tools for extracting different lexical items for different purposes have been developed. The focus of this study was semantic preference, the relation between a word form and set of semantically-related words. This research specifically studied semantic preference of words increase and improve that seem to be problematic for language learners. Hence, the present study aimed to describe students' usage of verb-noun collocation by analyzing their argumentative essays. This, therefore, triggers the researcher to further compare it by semantically exploring how the native speakers' collocation usage of increase and improve. In the scope of corpus, the online British Academic Written English (BAWE), the research used sequential explanatory design that primary focus is to explain the phenomenon. The result of the study was that the English language learners mostly made errors in using the collocations of increase and improve. In addition, BAWE pointed out increase mainly collocates with quantity, such as rate, number, level, cost, value, amount and price whereas improve with quality. The errors are caused by the transfer of first language, Indonesian, to second language, English. To establish evidence, researcher used the Indonesian Web Corpus (IndonesianWaC).

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