An Analytic Study of English Tense and Aspect Errors Committed by Senior High School and Vocational High School Students in Taipei County

• Main Authors: Chi-jen Liang, 梁啟真
• Other Authors: Ching-chi Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/19801037964926401595

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 95 === ABSTRACT The study aims to investigate the performance of the senior high school students and vocational high school students in the use of English tense and aspect forms. The purposes are to find the students’ difficulties with this area of grammar learning, to identify the possible reasons for committing such errors, to realize the strategies the students take in the process of learning, to compare the differences between the senior high school students and vocational high school students, and to provide some proper implications and methods to promote the efficiencies in teaching English tenses and aspects. The subjects of the study contain 91 senior high school students and 91 vocational high school students in Northern Taiwan. Nine English tense and aspect forms are arranged in a test paper mainly adopted from Wong’s design (1999) with six short paragraphs in it. All of the errors are categorized into seven error types. The results indicate that according to the statistics, the four highest error frequencies in the use of tenses and aspects for senior high school students rank in descending order as follows: (1) the present perfect progressive (2) the future perfect (3) the past perfect (4) the present progressive, while those for vocational high school students are (1) the present perfect progressive (2) the future perfect (3) the past perfect (4) the present perfect. In terms of their performance among the seven types classified in the study, tense and aspect misuse ranks the highest. It indicates that many of the senior and vocational high school students in our study encounter difficulties in correctly using English tense and aspect forms, especially the present perfect progressive and the perfect forms. Interference from mother tongue turns out to be one of the most important causes for making tense and aspect errors. Since there is no inflectional paradigm in Mandarin, students often don’t add proper suffix to the verbs such as misusing the simple present for the simple past. Besides, because English and Chinese have different expressions of time, students also often get confused with the reference time or wrongly perceive it in translating Chinese into English. In terms of the study, the researcher proposes some suggestions as a reference to those who are interested in teaching and doing researches on English tense and aspect forms. Contrastive analysis between the tense and aspect system of English and Chinese helps us locate the sources of interference and find the remedies. Besides, discourse analysis will also be helpful for students in understanding the interaction between the temporal relations of events in the contexts. In addition, by teachers’ clear explanation and comparison of the uses in each tense and aspect form with the visible aids, the students will obtain an effective illustration and exemplification of the abstract relationship of tense and aspect forms. Communicative approach, emphasizing the authentic situation and use of the language, may also provide such an illustration and exemplification. Finally, jazz chant may offer an alternative method for teachers to use because students can repeatedly practice the principles of tense and aspect forms and variety of the verbal changes.