A Study Of Simple Past Tense Errors Produced By Chinese EFL Learners From The Perspective Of English Temporality And Chinese Spatiality

Tense and aspect are essential grammatical categories for expressing time.The differences between English and Chinese tenses make it one of the difficulties for Chinese English learners.However,studies on tense learning mainly focus on tense commonalities such as the order of tense acquisition and rarely analyze the deeper causes of learners’ grammatical misuses.Therefore,this paper discusses the tense errors in Chinese English learners’ written corpus-ST4 based on the perspective of temporal-spatial thinking differences between English and Chinese(Wang,2013a;2019)and explores the more profound reasons.This study first analyses the overall tense misuses,focusing on the English-Chinese comparison.It then discusses the characteristics of the most frequently present and past tense confusing errors in different sentence types.It also analyses the reasons for these errors.The study results find that advanced Chinese EFL learners continue to make significant tense errors,with the highest frequency of tense confusion between present tense and past tense;within the tense confusion,tense errors happened most frequently in complex sentences.More specifically:Learners tend to put the temporal adverbial expressing the past at the beginning of sentences,guiding the tense of whole sentences or entire paragraphs.This tendency leads learners to easily ignore the past tense of verbs in sentences,which is manifested as ignoring the past tense of verbs after time adverbs in simple sentences;in compound sentences and complex sentences,only the past tense of the first verb is correctly marked.The study concludes that the main reasons for learners’ misuse of tenses are: native language transfer caused by the difference in tense expressions between English and Chinese in the learning process;the difference in the conceptual categories of time between English and Chinese;and the deeper reasons can be traced to English Temporality and Chinese Spatiality.Chinese learners tend to use spatial thinking to conceptualize events,ignoring the one-dimensional temporal linearity required in English.This thesis has particular implications for the teaching of English: The role of the native language should not be ignored in teaching,and the differences in tense representation between English and Chinese and the deeper reasons for the differences should be fully understood.Emphasis on English temporality and Chinese spatiality and English-Chinese contrastive teaching methods can inhibit learners’ native language transfer and facilitate the tense learning.