Abstrak
This research is categorized as quantitative research. The purposes of this thesis are to categorize the students ability in distinguishing simple past tense and present perfect tense . This research was focused on analysis of students ability in distinguishing simple past tense and present perfeect tense at the ninth grade of SMPN 4 Bukittinggi. The researcher conducted this research because the researcher found several problems. Those problems were related through in terviews with English teacher and students at SMPN 4 Bukittinggi. The first problem was students have difficulty in using the simple past tense and present perfect tense patterns. The second problem was students have difficulty in using irregular verbs and irregular verbs. The third problem was students have difficulty using adverbs of time from the two tenses. In this case, this research will find out "How is the level of students' ability to distinguish simple past tense and present perfect tense in class IX SMPN 4 Bukittinggi?. The instruments of the research used test multiple choice and true false .The researchers used a quantitative descriptive method. The population of this study was students of class 9 D with a total of 30 students. Researchers used purposive sampling to obtain data from the sample. The result shows that there is 1 (3%) students categorized excellent. There are 2 (7%) students categorized good, There are 8 (27%) students categorize fair. There are 19 students (63%) categorized poor. The average score 44.46, the highest score is 83 and the lowest score is 17. Therefore, it can be concluded that students' ability to distinguish simple past tense and present perfect tense is still lacking.