Chapter Ⅰ Introduction
1.1 Research Background
English verb tense is an important part of English grammar in Junior high schoolEnglish study. Tense is the most essential and difficult grammatical item in Englishgrammar system. (Harlig 2000). The acquisition of tense is a slow and arduous process forforeign language learners of English, and quite a few learners frequently make tense errorseven though they are advanced level of English learners. (Han & Fan 2007). Having agood command of English verb tense will undoubtedly facilitate learners’ competence andaccuracy of language use. In China, according to the New English Curriculum Standards(2011), ten kinds of English verb tenses should be taught before students entered college.In junior high schools, students are required to master six major kinds of English verbtense, they are: simple present tense, simple past tense, simple future tense, presentcontinuous tense, past continuous tense, and present perfect tense. And the rest of thetenses should be learned in senior high school, they are: past perfect tense, present perfectcontinuous tense, past future tense, future continuous tense.Mongolian students in Inner Mongolia of China is a special group of learners. Theylearn English as a third language under the bilingual environment, and take Mongolian asthe first language and Chinese as the second language. Mongolian students began to learnEnglish from Grade Three of elementary school from 2003 in Inner Mongolia. Accordingto Odlin (2003), the language learners tend to depend more on their first language at theearly stage than the intermediate or advanced level when learner’s knowledge of the targetlanguage is still weak. When the first language and the target language have somecoincidences in structure, the positive transfer might occur; otherwise, the negative transferwould influence the learners. So the language transfer has been a main issue in the field ofsecond language acquisition and language teaching for many years.As for Mongolian students, the features of Mongolian must influence the languagesystem of students and reshape their language system. When the learners begin to learn asecond language, they tend to commit a lot of errors which are not associated with theforms of L1(First Language) and L2(Second Language).
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
In our country, the research related to minority groups, especially about Mongolianstudents’ English verb tense learning is still lacking. It is of great significance to studyMongolian junior high school students’English learning and teaching. The author hopes tofind some distinguishing features of English verb tense learning among Mongolian juniorhigh school students and provide some relatively useful information for teachers ofMongolian junior high school students.First, the author wants to know about the current situation of six basic tenses learningin Mongolian junior high school.Second, the author intends to understand what difficulties the students have when theylearn these six tenses.Third, the author aims at analyzing the existing tense errors and to putting forwardsome suggestions to improve Mongolian junior high school students’ English verb tenselearning.
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Chapter Ⅱ Literature Review
2.1 Definition of English Verb Tense
For many linguists, English verb tense has been a subject of discussion in thestudy of grammar for a long time. The term English tense originates from the Latinword “tempus”, which means time (Comrie 1985). Tense originally is to distinguishtime. The explanation of the word “tense” in Longman Dictionary of ContemporaryEnglish is “ any of the forms of a verb that show the time, continuance, or completionof an action or state that is expressed by the verb.”Researchers have already given various kinds of definitions on English tense.Yule (2002) wrote in the book “Explaining English Grammar” “to describe thedifferent forms of the verb, it need to talk about Tense, which often has to do with thelocation of a situation in time, and Aspect, which characterizes the way in which thatsituation is perceived or experienced. ”In history, grammarians had different viewpoints of tense and different ways ofdescribing it. From the traditional point of view, there are mainly two kinds of Englishtense, which is bi-tense and multi-tense.Bi-tense state that there are only two tenses in English, present tense and pasttense. The former refers to present time while the later mainly expresses past time.Nowadays many researchers consider bi-tense more reasonable and take it as the basisfor the study in the tense of the English verb (Quirk et al. 1985; Zhang 1995).According to Yule (2002), English has two distinct tense forms, PRESENT and PASTTENSE, and two distinct forms for aspect, PERFECT AND PROGRESSIVEASPECT, which are marked on the verb (The progressive is also called thecontinuous). They hold that bi-tense has made a clear distinction between tense andaspect, for they are different from each other even though they must be combinedtogether to express a complete action. Moreover, the past or present actions are whatwe have experienced, so we can use concrete verb form to express our idea of the pastand the present time.
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2.2 The Comparison between English and Mongolian Verb Tense Expression
As we all know, Mongolian and English belong to different language families.English belongs to Indo-European language system and Mongolian language belongsto Altaic-language system. Mongolian language is a kind of agglutinating language,by adding a variety of suffixes in the back of the word to express grammaticalchanges.(Qinggeltei, 1999).There exist differences and similarities in Mongolian and English tense andaspect systems:Mongolian verb tense expression is more complicated than English. TheMongolian mainly relies on different kinds of suffixes “verb + suffix” or “verb +auxiliary” to express different kinds of tenses. (Qinggeltei, 1999). (more detailedinformation in Table 2.1) In Mongolian language, there are three kinds of tense toexpress time: that is present tense and past tense and future tense. This does not meanthat Mongolian language can not express time like English with sixteen kinds of tense,because some suffixes can also express the action is in progress or finished.(Han,2003).According the Mongolian linguist Qinggeltei, here will show how Mongoliansuffix express different kinds of tenses:1. There is expression of time suffix “jai, cai, ba(be), la(le), na(ne)” to expressdifferent kinds of tense.“V+ jai, cai, ba(be), la(le)”to express simple past tense. V+na(ne) to express simple present tense, and V+ na(ne) can also express simple futuretense.2. Some verb participle suffix can also express time: -agsan(-egsen), -dag(-deg),-ho (-hu). V+ -agsan(egsen) can express the meaning of simple past tense and presentperfect tense. V+ dag(deg) can express the meaning of simple present tense, simplepast tense and present perfect tense.3. Mongolian converbs “V+ jo/cho baina” V+ ga,(ge)” can express presentcontinuous tense. “V+ jo/cho baijai”can express past continuous tense. V+ gaad(geed)baina.
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Chapter Ⅲ Research Design....20
3.1 Research Questions.......20
3.2 Subjects of the Study ....20
3.3 Methods and Instruments.......21
3.3.1 Questionnaire ......21
3.3.2 Grammar Tests ....22
3.3.3 Interview ....22
3.4 Procedure of the Study...........23
Chapter Ⅳ Research Results and Discussion.....24
4.1 Analysis of the Questionnaire .........24
4.1.1 Analysis of the First Part of the Questionnaire:........24
4.1.2 Analysis of the Second Part of the Questionnaire: ............26
4.2 Analysis of Test 1 and Test 2 ..........32
4.3 Analysis of Different Types of Tense Errors from Test 3 ............35
4.3.1 Analysis of Tense Errors in Part 1 of Test 3.....36
4.3.2 Analysis of Tense Errors in Part 2 of Test 3.....37
4.3.3 Other Causes of Errors..........42
4.4 Result from the Interview ......42
4.5 Discussion ............47
Chapter Ⅴ Conclusion....50
5.1 Major Findings.....50
5.2 Pedagogical Implications .......50
5.3 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study .........54
Chapter Ⅳ Research Results and Discussion
In this chapter, the author makes an analysis of the Questionnaire and the frequenciesof specific types of tense errors from the tense tests to answer first two research questions,distributions of tense errors in the Mongolian-English translation test will also complementthe second research question. Finally, findings about the interview will illustrate the thirdresearch question.
4.1 Analysis of the Questionnaire
The first part of the questionnaire is to testify the degree of tense difficulty whichMongolian students felt；The second part is to know about whether the students acquiredeach kinds of usage of tenses.The percentage of 247 students’ answer shows on following table: (Note: Q1= simplepresent tense, Q2 = present continuous tense, Q3 = present perfect tense, Q4 = simplefuture tense, Q5 = simple past tense, Q6 = past continuous tense. The choice of eachquestion is ranked into 4 levels: Easy, Normal, Difficult, Very Difficult.)In Q1: 54.25% of the students consider the Simple Present Tense is easy. 24.69% ofstudents choose Normal; 14.57% students think that Simple Present Tense is Difficult. VeryDifficult accounts for 6.47%. In Q2: It is clear that Present Continuous Tense is the easiestfor students to learn that 63.56% students choose Easy, 20.24% for Normal, 12.55% forDifficult, only 3.64% for Very Difficult. In Q3: Only 4.45% of students think PresentPerfect Tense is easy, 13.76% choose Normal, Totally 77.72% of the students consider thatPresent Perfect Tense is difficult to learn as 21.45% choose Difficult and 56.27% chooseVery Difficult.In Q4: 27.93% students hold that Simple Future Tense is easy, 44.53% for Normal,19.02% for Difficult, 8.50% for Very Difficult. In Q5: 11.74% of students think SimplePast Tense is easy, 12.95% for Normal, Totally 61.24% of the students consider that SimplePast Tense is difficult to learn as 32.38% choose Difficult and 28.74% choose VeryDifficult. In Q6: 14.57% of students hold that Past Continuous Tense is easy, 28.34 %Choose Normal, Totally 57.08% of the students feel that Past Continuous Tense is difficultto learn as the students choose 38.46% for Difficult, 18.62% for Very Difficult.
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Conclusion
(1) The results of the questionnaire show that the Mongolian Junior Three Students’perception of difficulty of learning tenses is Present Perfect Tense> Simple PastTense>Past Continuous Tense> Simple Future Tense > Simple Present Tense> PresentContinuous Tense. Students generally agree that Present Perfect Tense is the most difficultone for them to use freely.
(2) From the result of grammatical tense test 1 and test 2, it is found that English verbtenses are mistakenly used seriously. Among those tense errors, those which were madebetween Present Perfect Tense and Simple Past Tense, between Simple Past Tense andSimple Present Tense, between Past Continuous Tense and Simple Past Tense have arelative high proportion. From Test 3, the author collected 1172 errors, among them,interlingual errors (LI interference) accounted for 42.2% and intralingual errors (targetlanguage causes) 57.8%, which are the main causes,. Therefore, the causes of English verbtense errors are complicated.
(3) The interviews collect some qualitative data, which illustrate the reasons why thestudents made those typical errors in English verb tense learning. First, they are lack ofgood learning strategies to memorize those tense expression and the verb change rules inEnglish. Because of lack of the target language rules, students are easily to make differentkinds of errors. Second, another major cause is less effective practice. Third, the studentsare lack of target language context, except text books and normal teaching class. Theydon’t have real communication contexts, so they feel hard to decide which tense isappropriate in given sentences or a given context.
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References (abbreviated)