Arabic First-Language Interference in English Tense Usage: A Critical Review of Tense and Aspect Difficulties among Arab EFL Learners

Abstract

The present study aims to demonstrate Arabic first-language (L1) interference and its effect on the use of English tenses by Arabic-English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. It integrates the theoretical and empirical literature on language transfer, contrastive analysis, interlanguage, and error analysis to examine how tense and aspect remain hot and interesting topics among Arab learners in speech and writing. A critical narrative approach has been adopted for the present study to achieve its objective. The findings reveal that different issues and challenges face the Arab EFL learners. It does not think that the situation can be reduced to a simple rule that says Arabic has fewer tenses than English. Rather, there are differences between Arabic and English in the conceptualization of temporality. The English language primarily uses grammaticalized tenses and aspects with auxiliary verbs, and there are minor differences between the past, present, and past events. Arabic, on the other hand, tends to allocate time among the verb's aspect, contextual time indicators, particles, and adverbial clauses. Such cross-linguistic incongruities result in common mistakes in the use of simple past and simple present, present perfect, present progressive, the omission of the copula and auxiliary verbs, and the mixing up of forms and reference to time by learners. Finally, the study also shows that not all tense errors are interlingual. They can also be intralingual, resulting from overgeneralization and classroom instruction that taught students to memorize forms rather than discourses.