Is Avoidance a Reflection of Mother Tongue Interference? The Case for the English Present Perfect Tense

Abstract

Practising teachers, as well as ianguage learning researchers involved with Arab learners of English as a foreign language must have observed the fact that the perfect tense in its present, past as well as continuous forms is one of the most difficult English tenses to use well or even correctly. They must have also noticed that the present perfect simple tense and the present perfect continuous tend to be replaced by the past simple tense and the present continuous respectively. This problem, however, is not peculiar to Arabic-speaking learners of English. In Realms of Meaning, Hofmann (1993:119) explains that "one ofthe harder things about learning English well is knowing when to use the past tense and when to use the perfect aspect". Various research studies into the acquisition of the present perfect tense suggest that this is a universal problem involving learners of English as a foreign/second language from diverse language backgrounds. In a paper presented at the annual convention of TESOL held in Honolulu in May 1982, Raymond concludes that "ESL learners often avoid using the present perfect tense or use it improperly". In contrast with native speakers of English sampled from newspaper editorials, of whom 75% used the present perfect, only 22% of ESL college students used the present perfect correctly. The reseaxcher attributes this avoidance in part to "lack of understanding of the function of the present perfect, especially in contrast with the simple past". Although not stated, one is led to believe that the ESL subjects of 141 this study used the simple past where the present perfect should have been used. This ·is the same strategy employed by Arabic-speaking learners of EFL (cf. Mukattash, 1978; Kharma and Hajjaj, 1989). .