The English Teaching of Tenses, Aspects, and Moods in Senior High Schools in Padang

The description of Tense, Aspect and Mood (TAM) varies from Grammar to Grammar based on the author's preference. The researchers want to study and compare the description of TAM in Teaching English in senior high schools in Padang City, West Sumatra, with theories from modern syntactic books. The steps in conducting this research are collecting data, analyzing data, and presenting the results of the analysis. The researchers conducted observations and interviews with five teachers as the informants from 5 different high schools in Padang City. We also interviewed 50 new entrance of 2019 year students at Universitas Andalas from various faculties/departments such as Medicine, Chemistry, Information Technology, Accounting, Management, and Animal Science, who came from Senior High School in Padang. The researcher then studied all the data and analyzed them using the theory proposed by some experts. The results showed that English Grammar was not discussed in depth. In general, the teachers assumed that there were 16 tenses in English; thus, first-year students also understood that there were 16 tenses. The study of tenses was usually embedded when studying the text. The teachers also did not understand the term and concept of aspects in the form of internal time tempo (progressive and perfect), so that the new entrance students in some faculty of Universitas Andalas were not familiar with the term aspects. In general, these tenses were taught with the mood constructions: Positive +, Negative -, and Question?. It could be interpreted that the English teaching patterns of TAM in High Schools were by giving formulas and memorizing and not by giving concepts.