An Investigation into University Students’ Errors in Tenses in their Written Production

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate university student’s errors in English tenses, in their written production. The researcher used the descriptive analytical method and the Statistical Program for Data Analysis. 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 first language, and the target language. The researcher recommended that further research should be carried out, in the areas of tenses, as the data of the analysis indicated that.