A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND ARABIC TENSES

The study deals with the similarities and differences of Tenses in English and Arabic Tenses. The application to the language teaching and learning process. In this study the researcher focuses on the three main tenses of both languages namely simple Present Tense, simple Past Tense, and Future Tense, that is describing the verb systems of both languages based on to each tense. The data that support this study are obtained by applying a documentary technique that selected by reading some references related to the subject matters. The data are analyzed by using the theory of Contrastive Analysis to found out the similarities and differences of tenses in English and Arabic. The findings show some aspects of tenses in English are similar to those in Arabic. The differences are both English and Arabic has different number of pronoun. English consists of seven pronouns while Arabic pronouns are fourteen which influence the verb formation.