Investigating Undergraduates' Tense Errors' in Writing

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate university students ' errors in English tenses, in their writing. The researcher used the descriptive analytical method, and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) when designed a test covering different tools used this study. The test covered different areas of English language tenses. Results of the study indicated that University students who were chosen for this study, we found to be facing a real problem, when writing English tenses. This problem affected their performance. The study showed also that the greatest numbers of errors were found to be due to omission of verbs and verbs to be. Moreover the results revealed that the reason behind the student's errors was a linguistic cause related to the interference of their native language, and the target language the researcher recommends that grammatical rules should be taught through context with regards to tenses, and the students should apply and practice those particular grammatical rules in context. In the ends the researcher suggests, that further research should be carried out, in the areas of tenses, as the data of the analysis indicated that, English language tenses are difficult to study, therefore, English tenses need to be investigated in depth.