Errors in english tenses made by the fourth semester student of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya [CD-ROM]

Key words: Error Analysis, Tenses. In English, tenses system is quite complicated, but the most common problem is not how to form tenses but decide which tense to use in a given situation. The different tenses are signaled by verb endings or by auxiliary verbs. This makes the writer assume that there are many students, even at the English department, who still cannot use “Tense” in the correct way related to functions. Therefore, the writer is interested in analyzing the errors of using tense in English. The purpose of this study is to find out the type of errors that the students made in constructing English sentences using Simple Present Tense, Present Continuous Tense, Simple Past Tense, Past Continuous Tense, Future Tense, Future Continuous Tense, Present Perfect Tense, and Present Perfect Continuous Tense and the percentage of students who know the form but not the function, know the function but not the form, know both the form and the function, and know neither the function nor the form, the writer conducted the study under report at the fourth – semester students’ structure III of the English Department of Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya, academic 2008-2009 being the subject of the study. Supporting this study, the writer presented the theory of error analysis involving the type of errors and the source of errors, and the theory of tenses involving the form and the use of using Simple Present Tense, Present Continuous Tense, Simple Past Tense, Past Continuous Tense, Future Tense, Future Continuous Tense, Present Perfect Tense, and Present Perfect Continuous Tense. After getting the data, the writer identified, analyzed, classified and counted the errors according to the theory of Dulay et al. she ranked the errors according to their frequency of occurances and found that the most errors that the students made are in the Future Continuous Tense (19.10 %). The second is in the Present Perfect Continuous Tense (18.10%). The third is in the Present Perfect Tense (14.86 %). The fourth is in the Present Continuous Tense (13.86 %). The fifth is in the Past Continuous (11.36 %). The sixth is in the Future Tense (8.86 %). The seventh is in the Simple Past Tense (7.49 %) and the fewest errors that the students made is in the Present Tense (6.37 %). And there are 42.33 % students who know the form but not the function, 39.17% students who know both the form and the function, 13.58 % students who know neither the function nor the form, and 4.92 % students who know the function but not the form. Based on the results, the writer concludes that most of the students still have difficulties in learning tenses, especially Future Continuous Tense. The made mistakes since they didn’t know the use of Future Continuous Tense well so that they wrote the wrong forms. Most of the students only know the form but not at the functions. At last, the writer hopes that the findings of this study could give better information about how the students learn the English tenses, so that teachers can improve their technique in teaching tenses