awej 5 no.4 full issue 2014

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.3, 2014Errors Analysis: A Case Study of Saudi Learner‟s EnglishAlahmadi Last year I had Diploma and come here to complete a degree” instead of “came here.The other type of misuse of tenses is:2.2 Misuse of Present tense:Students tended to switch between different present tenses such as mixing between presentsimple and continuous: for example: I am study English from the intermediate school.In addition, a similar type of error occurred with the use of future tense:2.3 Misuse of Future tense:The following examples explain some of the students‟ errors when it came to the future tense,with many of them mixing up the present and the future tense in the third part of the interview,when students were asked to talk about their future plans, such as: I set front of the TV, I`ll be online.In fact, this type of grammatical error is indicative of a real problem faced by Saudi students;According to the literature, misuse of the verb tenses by second language learners has beendivided into two main categories; either the misuse of verb tenses which results in errors likethose in 1- “tense sequence: where learners of English may use present simple with past simpletenses particularly with compound and complex sentences” (Noor, 1996, p. 4), or 2- “Tensesubstitution”, where learners substitute one verb of English tense into another (Noor, 1996). Thisled students to use different types of verb tenses when they produced a different structure ofsentences as indicated in the examples given above. This was illustrated in the examples, withstudents mixing between the present tense and the future tense when they wanted to describe anaction which will happen in the future. Indeed, the tense of sequences was identified as aproblem for students and resulted in such errors. In fact, according to Noor (1996), El-Sayed(1983), Arab learners tend to face this problem with tenses when they express themselves inEnglish, as expressing an action using a verb in Arabic requires the use of only one tense. Thisis in contrast with the English language, where the use of two different tenses can be used in onesentence, although Arabic does not have this kind of language structure. Indeed, this type of errorcan clearly be identified as “Negative transfer”, with students following the same pattern of theirfirst language “Arabic”. This justifies, to a certain some extent, the fact that Saudi studentsfollow Arabic structure when it comes to this type of error.Referring to this example in particular, it could be seen as a result of interference from L1, as inEnglish verbs are inflected according to time (tenses), as is the case in the previous examples.3. Misuse of articlesFollowing the first two categories, students in Saudi Arabia found the use of “English articles”another problem when producing English sentences during speech. As a matter of fact, almostevery student in this particular group committed this type of error at least 22 times duringapproximately 12 minutes of speech with an average number of 25.0 among the total of othertypes of errors. This indicated that Saudi students have a real problem when it comes to thecorrect and appropriate use of English articles. In reference to English language grammar, theuse of articles is divided into two main types: definite and indefinite articles. These articles areconsidered to be adjectives, as they are usually used before a noun in the English language.According to the Oxford dictionary, “definite articles” refer to the word “the” as it is indicativeof something specific. On the other hand, the “indefinite articles” unusually refer to the use of“an” and “a” which indicate something unspecific. As a result, errors will be classified accordingto those two types:Arab World English Journalwww.awej.org 90ISSN: 2229-9327