Using LINE to Encourage Students' Correct Tense Usages

Abstract

This study aims to investigate what correct tenses students used and to study students' attitudes towards LINE Messenger. The subjects of the study were 102 undergraduate students majoring in English for International Communication. The research instruments were: Handouts of 7 tenses, LINE Messenger and Questionnaires which were three parts: factors affecting students' using Tenses, students' attitudes towards Tenses usage on LINE and students' perceptions of advantages and disadvantages when using LINE. The procedures were: firstly 4-8 students were allowed to create their own LINE groups, then students' chatting were started at the second week of the Advanced Reading course for five working days with the conditions that chatting in a sentence embedded with any tenses of 7 tenses. The statistics used for analyzing the data were percentage and mean. The results show that from 1882 sentences, there were 1615 sentences in correct tense usages: 970 sentences were used in present simple tense, 264 sentences were used in past simple tense, and only 1 sentence were in Past Perfect Tense. However, there were 79 sentences in incorrect tense usages which were 30 sentences of other misused of the simple present, 16 sentences were misuse of the simple present for the simple past, 11 sentences were misuse of the simple past for the simple present. For students' attitudes towards using Tenses on LINE Messenger, half of the students agreed that their tenses had improved after using tenses on LINE for 5 days and LINE was suitable for learning how to use Tenses.