A study on errors made by Tamil speaking adult students in using present simple tense in English

Abstract

The paper examines the errors made by the Tamil speaking students of South Eastern University of Sri Lanka in using present simple tense in English. It focuses on the errors on the third person singular present tense agreement with morpheme –s and the inter-language grammar influence. The finding suggests that the Tamil speaking English language learners have difficulty in the use of –s due to mother tongue influence. The phonological similarity, omission, incorrect suffixation and substitution are the most common types of errors found in their usage.