Grammatical expressions of time in English

Language educators have been sharing their grievances over the poor mastery of English among the L2 learners. Many past studies demonstrated that L2 learners encountered difficulties in understanding and using grammatical features including Tenses. Several other studies pointed out that the difficulties are due to the differences between the learners’ first language (L1) and the target language (L2) in terms of the structure, leading them to transfer their knowledge of L1 to L2 and eventually, producing many language errors. Such an occurrence is called ‘Negative Language Transfer’. Nevertheless, not always that the transferring of the L1 knowledge to L2 will cause errors. In some studies, it was shown that knowing the differences as well as similarities between L1 and L2 would reversely facilitate the learners to acquire L2 and to be good in both languages. This paper, apart from highlighting problems faced by the L2 learners in using appropriate English Tenses, seeks to review past studies examining the grammatical expressions used to convey time messages in English. It is hoped that with the information presented, language educators would be able to devise teaching techniques that would make the L2 learners notice the differences between English (L2) and their L1s in terms of the grammatical expressions used to convey time messages