Tense and Aspect in the English Language : A study about newly arrived students with Arabic as their mother tongue

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to examine how newly arrived Arabic speaking students use tense and aspect in the English language and to find out whether their native language affects their learning. The study is based on both qualitative and quantitative methods where the focus is on different texts written by students. There were 17 students between the ages of 18-21 included in this study, and all participants are currently in different programs in upper secondary school in Sweden. According to the results, the students have difficulties regarding their usage of grammatical tense since the grammatical structure in the Arabic language differs from the English language. Their native language hinders their learning since there is a lot of interference from their mother tongue and this leads to various errors in their learning. Some errors are not due to interference, in fact, some of the errors indicate that some students struggle with the grammatical structure of the target language.