My thesis aims to investigate the acquisition of the English present perfect tense in the case of Hungarian native speakers learning English as a foreign language. Language acquisition has been one of the central issues in Applied Linguistics for the last couple of decades. A great deal of studies has been published exploring different areas of first and second language acquisition. Most of those articles, essays are based on empirical evidence. These studies have a clear practical motivation, too. As Roar Ravem puts it: “The more we know about language learning, the more likely we are to be successful in our teaching of a second language.” (Ravem, 1993, 124) Language teaching is a field where the findings of Applied Linguistics are used in practice, linguists and language teachers work together to find out as much as possible about the ways, steps, features. of language acquisition, which is then used to develop and to perfect teaching syllabuses.