A Corpus-based Study Of Misuse Of Tenses By Chinese English Learners

Verb tenses are regarded as one of the most difficult grammatical points in English and one of the areas that are least understood by Chinese EFL learners. Although a number of researches have been done on this topic, they either focused on one particular tense or on the influence of one particular aspect on students'use of tense with a small-scale database. In the present study, we adopt as our source of the data a one-million-word corpus–CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus), which has the compositions of senior high school students, English major students and non-English major students at both low and high grades included in each of its five sub-corpora. Based on one of the influential tense models–Declerck's tense model and the EA theory, the present study aims to investigate misuse of tenses characterized by Chinese English learners and through the discussions, throw some light on English tense teaching in China.In this study, we adopt corpus approach by means of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus). After investigating 2703 misuse of tenses tagged as vp6 in the five sub-corpora, the major findings are obtained:1) According to Declerck's tense model, for the eight categories of tense among all the five sub-corpora, present tense and past tense are the two most frequently misused tenses while future perfect tense and conditional perfect tense are least frequently misused.2) Within the five sub-corpora, senior high school students far outweigh the other groups in terms of the frequency of misuse of the eight tenses whereas seniors majoring in English misuse English tenses least frequently. The frequencies of misuse of tenses of non-English major students at a lower grade and a higher grade are similar while English-major students at a lower grade are shown to commit more tense errors than the students at a higher grade.3) Among all the specific types of tenses misused as substitutions of a correct tense, present tense is most frequently mistakenly marked on the verb when it is supposed to be marked with past tense, which is followed by the misuse of past tense when present tense should be used instead.4) In ST2 (the group of senior high school students), ST3 (the group of non-English major students at a lower grade) and ST5 (the group of English major students at a lower grade), misuse of present tense as a substitution of past tense occurs most frequently while in ST4 (the group of non-English major students at a higher grade) and ST6 (the group of English major students at a higher grade), misuse of past tense to substitute present tense happens most frequently.The present study also discusses the causes leading to Chinese English learners'misuse of tenses from the perspective of L1-transfer, target language, and cognition. The results together with the discussions provide some implications for English tense teaching in China.