A Corpus-based Study On The Use Development Of Simple Past Tense And Its Variations In Middle School Students’ English Writings

As one of the most important grammatical categories, tense and aspect areusually one of the most important areas in both theoretical and applied linguisticresearch. As one of the key aspects of English curriculum for middle school students,simple past tense is usually considered difficult for English learners to learn andteachers to teach in China. This dissertation intends to do an empirical study onsimple past tense used by Chinese middle school learners of English as a foreignlanguage in order to help English learners and teachers to improve their learning andteaching.Various studies have been conducted on tense and aspect. Research resultsindicated that achievements and accomplishments, semantically characterized as[+dynamic,+telic,+punctual] and [+dynamic,+telic,-punctual] respectively, tend tobe primarily marked by simple past tense. However, most of these studies werecarried out on those whose mother tongue is English or those who acquire English asa second language in natural learning circumstances, so whether the conclusion ofthe above studies is valid for Chinese learners of English as a foreign language stillwaits to be testified.This dissertation reports a corpus-based study to explore middle schoolstudents’ use of simple past tense and the occurrence of its variations from theperspective of lexical aspects of verbal items by answering the following threeresearch questions.1) In simple past tense obligatory contexts, what variationswould occur in middle school English learners’ compositions besides the appropriatesimple past tense marking?2) In middle school English learners’ compositions, whattype of lexical aspectual verbal items tends to correspond to which type of simplepast tense variations?3) What causes the occurrence of such a pattern of variations?By means of the retrieval software Antconc3.2.1w, the present study analyzesthe compositions written by students from Grade7,8and10, focusing on uses ofsimple past tense and its variations. Through the analysis of four types of lexicalaspectual verbal items marked by different simple past tense and its variations, thisstudy finds1) In simple past tense obligatory contexts, there are two majorvariations are identified, namely form errors and tense-aspect errors, committed by middle school English learners in their writing besides the appropriate simple pasttense marking. The tense-aspect errors includes, from higher frequency to lowerfrequency, simple present tense, perfect, and progressive, three types of variations.2)In middle school English learners’ compositions, the distribution of each type oflexical aspectual verbal items corresponding to each simple past tense variation isintroduced as the following. Simple past tense tends to mark achievements andaccomplishments primarily and one of the simple past variation, simple presenttense, tends to encode states and activities. The other two variations of simple pasttense, perfect and progressive, are inclined to associate with achievements andaccomplishments both entailed with the semantic property [+telic] and activitiesrespectively. Besides, a primary conclusion might be achieved that English learnerstend to acquire simple past tense in the first place and then followed by simplepresent tense, progressive and perfect in sequence.3) The effect of lexical aspects ofverbal items on tense-aspect marking is more significant than that of target events.Therefore, the primacy of aspect becomes salient and decisive to some extent. Theresearch results reported above provide a valid verification of the Aspect Hypothesisand they can be explained by means of the Prototype Theory together with threecognitive principles.This study is both theoretically and practically significant in linguistic researchand English teaching practices. The conclusions drawn from the present studyprovide not only guidance but also illumination for future English learning andteaching as a foreign language.