The Empirical Study Of Tense And Aspect In EFL Learners’’ Writing Through Task-based Approach

From the structuralism pedagogy, communicative teaching method and the generative grammar teaching method in 1960 s to the process-based approach and product-based approach in 1980 s, scholars have been discussing and exploring the most appropriate teaching method for second language writing production at home and abroad, and realize that there are some limitations in all these teaching methods. So, task-based approach is put forward. Task-based teaching approach is student-centered rather than teacher-centered, and it applies tasks in advancing EFL learners? ability of language output. So, task-based teaching approach is significant for the second language teaching and is worth being discussed and studied.The study for tense and aspect derives from ancient Greek, and there are a large number of books and papers are published following that time to illustrate this issue in great detail. With the development of the research of tense and aspect in English, researchers argue that the analysis of tense and aspect in English should be based on different expressive forms in different situation. In addition, tense is an objective term related to time while aspect is a subjective term used to indicate the internal temporal nature of a situation which is based on the speakers? choice. So, there is a need to distinguish tense from aspect during the research process. And there is no need to distinguish these two notions during the teaching process for learners will get confused about this distinction.This thesis aims to integrate tense and aspect acquisition with task-based teaching approach and try to find out whether task-based teaching approach can reduce the errors of tense and aspect use in EFL learner?s writing production. The main research questions are: What is the tendency of tense and aspect use in the EFL learners? writing production and whether errors of tense and aspect use made by EFL learners could be reduced in their writings through the task-based approach. Through a detailed research, this thesis aims at discovering answers to the above questions.This paper takes task-based approach as the theoretical basis. To answer the above questions, 10 high school graduates are chosen as subjects for this study. The writing task used for both pre-test and post-test is taken from IELTS test. And the data is collected through analyzing the usage of each tense and aspect. The results show that the frequency of tense use is higher than aspect use in the pre-test, which is receptively 89% and 11%. EFL learners tend to use tense more compared with aspect. After the application of task-based approach, the total errors of tense and aspect use in EFL learners? writing are reduced and the frequency of aspect use is increased while the frequency of tense use is still higher than aspect use. All the results of research are under the premise that the requirements of writing task are the same in pre-test and post-test.