The English past tense oral performance of Saudi EFL learners

Purpose The study aims to examine how Saudi EFL adult learners produce English past tense and explore the types of morphological errors that they make. It is hoped that the study findings and conclusions can help to promote the L2 past tense learning of Saudi EFL learners by reporting some insights and implications for Saudi EFL classrooms. Design/methodology/approach The study collected natural oral data from Saudi EFL adult students and used quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze data. The participants’ oral past tense production was transcribed and coded according to some morphological tense features: regular and irregular verb forms, adverbials, connectives and past markers. Findings Findings show that Saudi EFL students appropriated the use of English past tense. This appropriateness can be observed in the different ranges of regulars and irregulars, adverbials, connectives, tense markers, use of past modal verbs and progressive forms and relating the past tense events to the chronological order of their occurrences. Although students produced an adequate rate of regular verb sentences, they did not pay more attention to the accuracy of regular verbs and they produced a low rate of irregular verbs and tense markers. Originality/value The study contributes an original work to the body of L2 and EFL research by reporting the language performance and experience of Saudi EFL learners when they use English to narrate their past tense stories. The study’s findings and conclusions are essential for L2 and EFL research because they can help to understand the investigated phenomenon (the use and errors of English past tense) and bridge the research gap in the tense-aspect morphology of L2 research. The body of L2 tense-aspect morphology research still needs more research on Arab and Saudi EFL contexts.