The Effect of Interlanguage and Arabic Verb System on Producing Present Perfect by EFL Learners

Mona Tahseldar, Soha Kanso, Yousra Sabra

The acquisition of foreign language goes through many processes. One of these processes, which attempts to frame the impact of native language on foreign language, is Interlanguage. This study investigated the effect of Interlanguage and Arabic Verb System on producing Present Perfect by EFL learners. The participants of the study were Lebanese University undergraduates who had been studying EFL for 14 years. The erroneous, absence or unconventional usage of the present perfect motivated the researcher to inspect the reasons behind this production. The instrument of the study is four topics, addressing the present perfect temporal notion,was presented to the learners who chose two of them, and wrote a paragraph on each. The studied samples, which consisted of 100 paragraphs, belonged to 50 participants. Following quantitative and descriptive approach, the samples were collected, corrected, and data were analyzed using tables to demonstrate the percentages of proper usage of the present perfect and the verb forms that replaced it mistakenly. The results revealed that interlanguage is the reason behind the learners’ wrong production of the present perfect form, as they produced their own systematic linguistic system, which mixed between their native Arabic language verb system and their English tenses in replacing erroneously the present perfect.

https://doi.org/10.31871/IJNTR.4.8.15