EFL Saudi Undergraduates' Tenses Errors in Written Discourse Due to Interlingual and Intralingual Interference

Abstract

The current study aims to investigate the influence of interlingual and intralingual interference as sources of the errors of past and perfect tenses. The former refers to the errors generated by the negative effect of EFL learners' mother tongue as they try to bridge certain linguistic gabs. The latter, however, is pertaining to the errors produced by the target language itself as learners progressed in the learning process and face difficulties to employ the large amount of knowledge they have just acquired. The participants chosen are EFL Saudi Undergraduates whose academic specialisation is English. The result of the study showed that there was statistically significant difference between intralingual interference strategy and first language negative transfer as sources of errors of the past and present perfect tenses. This result revealed that the participants have reached a linguistic stage where the diverse rules of the target language itself create confusion for learners. The intralingual interference led the participants to making errors in the simple past, the past progressive, and the past perfect far more than when using L1 negative transfer strategy. While the first language negative transfer led the participants to committing errors in the present perfect progressive tense more so than when using the intralingual interference strategy. This result simply indicated that the difference in timeframe between Arabic and English led to significant number of errors which the students often transfer from their native language.