A study of Thai first-year university students' problems in the use of aspects in different tenses

The purpose of this study was to explore the tense that is the most problematic for Thai first-year university students’ accurate use of aspects. The participants were 90 first-year English and communication majors at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Ubon Ratchathani University. The data were collected by using a multiple choice test requiring the participants to choose the correct aspect in different temporal situations. The findings revealed that the future tense was the most problematic for the participants, especially in the use of the progressive and the perfective aspects whereas the present tense was the least difficult for them. There were various facets that contributed to the findings. The first was the Thai English curriculum based on the Basic Education Core Curriculum B.E. 2551 that Thai students are expected to use a tense,namely present simple, at the primary education level, whereas they study some tenses, namely present perfect, past perfect, or future perfect, at the secondary education level
so they are familiar with tense that they study at beginning level more than the higher level. The second was the level of difficulty of each tense and aspect use. Thai students have difficulties using tense-aspect combinations correctly when it involves more than one-time point. And the last one was the cross-linguistic influence or L1 transfer that normally occurs in foreign language learning.