An Investigation of EFL Students’ Misuse of the Perfect Aspect in Written Production

Abstract

students’ written production, at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University, through highlighting and finding out themost problematic aspect and perfect tenses for students, the types of errors committed, and the main reasons that lead to misuse them. Therefore, two hypotheses were formulated. The first one stipulates that more imperfection will be found in the use of the past perfect and future perfect than in the present perfect tense. The second hypothesis maintains that more imperfection will be found in the use of the perfect progressive aspect than in the perfect aspect. In order to test these hypotheses, two means of research were used to gather data; a grammar test and an analysis of students’ essays. The test was administered to fifty participants in order to highlight the most problematic English perfect tenses by identifying their types of errors. The second instrument was an analysis of students’ essays of the same participants, in order to determine the students’ failure in using perfect tenses. A comparison between the participants’ performances in the grammar test and their own writing essays was done. The results obtained showed that the most problematic perfect tenses in the test are the present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect, whereas in the essays, the most problematic tenses are the present perfect and past perfect. Whereas, the most problematic aspect is the simple aspect (present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect) in both test and essay. It was found that the main types of errors are substitution errors, misformation errors, omission errors, and errors of avoidance. The possible reasons of these errors are attributed mainly to the incomplete application of rules and ignorance of some others. On the basis of the results obtained, some pedagogical implications are provided.