Interlanguage Performance of EFL College Students: Evidenced in the First Semester of the English Letters Major-Indonesia

In EFL teaching, it has been theorized that intelligibility can be achieved by relative closeness of oral performance to the standard of EFL proficiency. The current study sought to investigate the position of interlanguage performance of EFL college students in terms of intelligibility of the language product (Speaking). Ten students’ Mid Semester Tests of the Speaking Class were videotaped as the source of data in the study. They were in the First Semester of the English Department, majoring in English Letters. The oral performance of EFL college students as the research subjects were analyzed employing QDA Miner, a research software for text mining to position the students’ points of interlanguage approximation. As it was only a case study with a limited number of subjects, the findings may not represent EFL students in general. It was revealed that only minimum intelligibility had been achieved. The students produced ungrammatical utterances, mispronounced words, limited communication strategies, lack of sentence variations, and most surprisingly with only a narrow scope of vocabulary selection to express their unforgettable memories in monologues. The errors were attributed to the influence of the mother tongue (Indonesian or Javanese in particular) within the interlanguage boundary of English and Indonesian. Room for improvement is still ahead as they are heading for the next seven semesters in the English Department. The study, pedagogically, concludes that, in teaching EFL, considerably sufficient proportions of teaching pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, should be given throughout the process of learning for the students to achieve the standard of EFL proficiency.