Taiwan EFL Learners'' Acquisition of English Temporal Morphemes in Reference to Lexical Semantics of Verbs in Mandarin And English

• Main Authors: Hui Hsien Lee, 李慧嫺
• Other Authors: Rueih-Lirng Sharon Fahn
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/93472921377336811463

博士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系博士班 === 94 === Since the morpheme studies of the 1970s, the investigation into how L2 learners acquire the tense and aspect morphology has been the focus of many descriptive and pedagogical accounts of languages. It is suggested that knowledge of how learners actually use the tense-aspect forms (both appropriately and inappropriately) would be a contributing factor to the implementation and effectiveness of certain pedagogical methodologies. Hence, the purpose of the study is to investigate whether the distributions of verbal inflections -ed and -ing were in accord with the predictions of Aspect Hypothesis since they are an indicator of the developing temporal system. In addition, the present study also concerns how temporal notions and structures of learners’ L1 affect their learning of English tense and aspect system. Participants were 105 English majors from two universities and one institute of technology in northern Taiwan. They were asked to carry out a number of tasks including a narrative writing task, a cloze test, a translation test, a multiple choice test containing tense and aspect questions and a multiple choice translation test. Data were collected in two separate phases with an interval of three weeks and analyzed by means of across and within category analyses and SPSS. Specifically, the statistical procedures include descriptive analyses, t-tests, and one-way ANOVAs. The results indicate that learners’ use of verbal inflections -ed and -ing were in line with the predictions of aspect hypothesis in that the progressive -ing were mostly attached to activity verbs and the past -ed were often attached to accomplishment and achievement verbs. As to the role of L1 temporal notions in the development of English tense and aspect system, it is found that a) form and meaning did not develop to the same degree, b) aspect is developed prior to tense, and c) learners’ uses of English present perfect, past perfect and inflection -ing were under the constraint of their mother tongue. On the basis of the findings, pedagogical implications, the limitations of the present study and recommendations for further study are provided.