The past tense expression of Indonesian learners: A morphosyntactic review and its implication toward teaching field

The different system of linguistic time between Indonesian and English causes certain difficulties for Indonesian learners who learn English. As a tense language, English has a grammatical system that verbs are changed to other forms through inflectional morphological process. On the contrary, Indonesian as a tenseless language, has an ungrammatical system of tense. So far, learners tend to be fixated on a series of formulas that have been memorized without fully understanding what the meaning of them as a comprehensive linguistic time concept. It becomes more confusing when they should express their idea through compound and complex sentences. This research aims to analyze the forms of the learners' written expression of past tense through the presence of verbs in each level of sentences, reveal the ill formed forms and analyze the causes of them linguistically as well. This research uses qualitative methods by which the empirical data are presented explanatorily by utilizing morphosyntactic theories. The data of this research are the essays of 9^th grade students from 3 classes totaling 105. The essays then were built and processed as corpus and text analysis. Data processing is carried out based on several steps, start from building corpus until interpretation. Based on the gained data, learners have not been able yet to express past tense correctly. Hence, teachers need to create a basic breakthrough in teaching it.