This study investigates how adult Saudi EFL learners produce English past-tense forms and identifies the morphological errors they make, with the aim of generating classroom insights to improve learners’ mastery of the L2 past tense. Natural oral data were elicited from Saudi university students, transcribed, and coded for key tense-related features—regular and irregular verb forms, adverbials, connectives, and past markers—then analyzed through combined quantitative and qualitative methods.
Results indicate that participants generally handled the English past tense appropriately, demonstrating varied use of regular and irregular verbs, adverbials, connectives, tense markers, past modals, progressive forms, and chronological sequencing of events. Nevertheless, while learners produced a satisfactory proportion of sentences with regular verbs, accuracy for those verbs was often weak, and their overall use of irregular verbs and tense markers was limited. By documenting Saudi learners’ performance and difficulties in narrative past-tense contexts, the study fills a gap in L2 tense-aspect morphology research—particularly within Arab and Saudi settings—and offers implications for teaching strategies that target the specific error patterns observed.