A Study of Errors Commited by Maithili Students in The Use of Present Tense in English

Abstract

This dissertation tries to compare and contrast perfective andimperfective aspects in English and Maithili.English is taught as a compulsory subject in Nepal; however, the learner'slanguage is not free from grammatical errors which prove that they havenot learnt the language well. The knowledge of grammar serves as thefoundation of language, it is an important asset a teachers should have hisdisposal. Grammatical knowledge makes him confident, self-reliant andready to disentangle the learner's confusions doubt and conflict on thosematters. The use of the present tense is often confusing not only for thelearners of school level but for the teachers. The main purposes of the present study were to identify the errorsin the use of present tense and identify the proficiency aswell as to pointout the pedagogical Implications. No research as yet has been done in thisarea to see what problems or difficulties the students face learning andusing present tense. To conduct the research, the researcher took the sample students studyingin grade 10 th in different government schools of Saptary district. 50Students (25 males and 25 females) from each school were selected forthe purpose of data collection in the tool used wasonly written script inmultiple choice items, fill in the gaps, true or false statements andtranslation from English toMaithili was given to the students to collectdata, their answer were checked, recorded and analyzedfindings. The thesis consists of four chapters; Introduction, Methodology,Analysis andInterpretationandFindingsandRecommendations.The first chapter of this thesis consists of general background anddescription of tense and aspects in English andMaithili. It also includesthe objectives, review of related literature, significance of thestudy andcontrastive analysis. The second chapter deals with methodology adopted for the study underwhich the sources of data collection, process of data collection andpopulation of the study and limitations of the study are mentioned. Similarly, the third chapter deals with the analysis and interpretations ofthe data obtained from applying simple statistical method of presenaspects. The last chapter deals with some suggestions made as the basis ofindings of the study and the tables and references are included in thefinal part of this study.