Abstract:
The paper examines the errors made by the Tamil speaking students of South Eastern
University of Sri Lanka in using present simple tense in English. It focuses on the errors on the third
person singular present tense agreement with morpheme –s and the inter-language grammar influence.
The finding suggests that the Tamil speaking English language learners have difficulty in the use of –s
due to mother tongue influence. The phonological similarity, omission, incorrect suffixation and
substitution are the most common types of errors found in their usage.
