Distribution Of Tenses In Chinese Students' Compositions

It is generally agreed by language researchers that temporality is an important concept in English that poses many acquisition problems for foreign language learners and second language learners of English.This study aims to explore the overall distribution of tenses used in Chinese students' writing and find out the overused and underused tenses through comparing with native speakers' tense usage characteristics. This research is corpus-based and statistical-driven.The results of the research could shed light on English tense and aspect teaching.Quirk's,Halliday's and Bo Bing's theories on tense are taken as theoretical base of the research.Classification by Bo Bing which is used in EFL learning in China is adopted in data analyses.The results show that Chinese university students overuse simple present tense and simple future tense and underuse simple past tense,past perfect tense and all the future tenses except for simple future tense in their English writing.And the chi-square results show that there are significant differences lying in simple present,simple past,past perfect,past future and simple future tense between the two corpora.Modals and infinitives combining with tenses are seldom used by Chinese students,which is also considered as one of the problems.