Comparison of the past tense in English and Turkish

In this study, I give a brief survey of contrastive linguisitics, the contrastive study of the past tense both in English and Turkish in detail and some examples of the most common mistakes Turkish students make while learning past tense in English. In introduction, the use of contrasting two grammatical structures are examined. Later on, various structures both from Turkish and English are contrasted. And in conclusion, the elements that affect language acquisition and Lado's assumptions about conttrastive work are studied. The structures contrasted in development are; narrative past and definite past, compound past tense, comparative, ağabeylity and necessity, expression of possession, nominalization, conditional, compound adverbial constructions, realative pronouns, gerund, passive and the verb "to be". Nominalizations, compound adverbial constructions and narrative past and definite past tense are studied in detail as they cause great difficulties during the acqusition process. Based on the findings I tried to give some advice on how to avoid errors in these grammatical areas.