Junior English Learners’ Tense And Aspect Acquisition In Oral Discourse From The Perspective Of The Aspect Hypothesis

Because of the spread of English, an increasing number of Chinese learnersregard English as their major foreign language, therefore English’s tense and aspectsystem attracts more attention. In order to elaborate the difference of tense and aspectsystem between Chinese and English languages, and to enhance the acquisition ofsecond language, numerous studies have been done these years. In this study, theauthor carries out a research on the aspect of verbs during the acquisition of simplepast tense, and discusses the acquisition of rules of simple past tense of students whoare studying in a second-year junior high school. Besides studying the influence of theaspect on the acquisition of simple past tense, the author does some researches on thetheories of first language transfer and the markedness, which may contribute to thecomprehension and learning of the hypothesis. The author intends to explain theirrelationship from a more comprehensive point of view. There are lots of researchesabout the Aspect Hypothesis both at home and at abroad, however, there are fewresearches on this hypothesis from the view of the oral English of Chinese junior highschool students, which is the innovation of this study.This study mainly involves three questions:(1) Does students’ usage of thesimple past tense conform to the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis?(2) Are the rateof under-generalization and that of overgeneralization affected by the first languagetransfer and the markedness?(3) In the preliminary of second language acquisition, isthe correct usage of the irregular form of the past tense higher than that of the regular form?The author chose30students as subjects from an English training school inQingdao to collect some data. Through analyzing the data under the guideline of theframework of the theories, the author gets such conclusions:(1) students’ usage ofthe simple past tense does not conform to the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesistotally;(2) the rate of under-generalization and overgeneralization are affected by thefirst language transfer and the markedness, and the using rate of under-generalizationis higher than that of the overgeneralization;(3) In the preliminary stage of secondlanguage acquisition, the correct usage of the irregular form of the past tense is higherthan that of the regular form.At last, author offers some suggestions for past tense teaching and learning:teachers should help students understand the types of aspect sufficiently and mark theverbs correctly, so as to help students to get rid of the influence of the negativetransfer of mother language and eliminate the impact of the differences betweenEnglish and Chinese tense and aspect system. At the same time, teachers also need toenhance students’ motivation of studying English, and keep them in a relaxed mood.However, this study also has some limitations, for example, the number of subjects islimited and the author only concentrates on the spoken language. In future study, theresearcher will conduct in a wider range and do some researches on both spoken andwritten discourses.