Mother Tongue Interference in Using Present Perfect Tense in Indonesian and Arabic EFL Settings

Abstract

This document-based paper hones in on how learners’ mother tongues affects their uses of second foreign language grammatical structures. It explicitly investigates EFL learners’ uses of the present perfect tense when they use English as their second language. Towards this end, a corpus of 216 sentences composed of a sample of 38 Indonesian and Arab undergraduate students was analyzed to detect erroneous uses of the present perfect tense (PPT) in their English writing. Out of this corpus, 12 erroneous structures were underlined in the Arab corpus and 17 in the Indonesian dataset. The incorrect sentences were singled out from the participants’ writing pieces, analyzed and discussed, paring them to SLA research and previous investigations. The findings showed that errors reflect interference of the participants’ mother tongue with English for the majority of errors grounded in either Arabic or Bahasa Indonesian languages. Arab learners seem to have more difficulties using the present perfect than the past tense. In contrast, the Indonesian EFL learners had difficulties in both past and present perfect tenses altogether due to the absence of the past tense in the Indonesian tongue. This yields important implications on the effects the mother tongue on learning another language – English is a working example.