Wrong Usage of English Tenses in Student’s Essays: The Nigerian Experience

Abstract

The paper examines wrong usage of English tenses in sentences contained in students’ essays. English as a language has distinct and peculiar rules governing its usage and the rules guiding the correct use of tenses is one of them. The theory adopted for this study is Error Analysis by Pit Corder and it is adopted because it has been observed over the years that learners and users of a second or foreign language, most often than not, transfer the grammatical and semantic features of their first language (mother tongue) to the language that is being learnt. During the study, it was discovered after a careful data analysis of students’ essays that English tenses are most of the time wrongly used by students. One of the recommendations given is that students should be encouraged and made to familiarize themselves with the distinctive English tense system so that they can easily identify their inadequacies in English tense usage and aim at improving on them to enhance their level of proficiency in English language usage generally.