Difficulties In Learning English As A Foreign Language

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Many students present a lot of difficulties in developing their oral or written skills in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) such as the third person singular in the simple present. It often confuses students because it expresses a singular idea and has a singular subject, but it must end with –s. In fact, they face some problems when they are learning third person singular. In addition, most of Spanish speakers tend to eliminate the final –s when they are learning English because of the influence of their mother tongue. According to Celaya (cited in Richards 1993) “found errors in the verb group such as omission of the copula, wrong forms after an auxiliary, omission if the auxiliary, omission of the “s” third person singular, and …show more content…

This means that in concord, a singular subject will always precede a singular verb, and a plural subject will precede a plural verb. The subjects were unable to use this form of SVA correctly and they made errors such as “lecturer mark…”, “student speak…”, “students writes…” and “people says…” Besides, when students develop an oral conversation in class with their classmates or teacher, they tend to show weaknesses with the use of this grammar structure. In the investigation by Mealings and Demuth (2014) stated that, “Song et al. (2009) found that, in spontaneous speech, children had more difficulty producing third person singular morphemes in longer sentences than shorter sentences. Longer sentences often involve increased grammatical complexity, both syntactically and semantically.” Furthermore, teacher must be attentive when their students develop the third person singular because there are some difficulties in regard to plural pronouns or nouns. As Wee, Sim & Jusoff (2010) argued that “It is important for language teachers and lecturers to teach the use of the third person singular in the simple present

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