Abstract
Chinese Students’ English has its own characteristics. It is of significance to analyze and study these characteristics. The paper uses the corpus approach to study the misuse of tenses in Chinese College students’ CET-4 compositions of the sub-corpus of “Non-major College Students” in the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Nine types of misuse are identified, and analysis is made of the causes of each type. It is found that the misuse of tenses in Chinese college students’ English compositions is mainly in the simple present tense and the simple past tense; the wrong collocation of tenses is mostly in the kind of complex sentence with the main clause and subordinate clause both indicating the future action and the subordinate clause using the simple present tense; as for the two special words “could” and “would” with both declarative and subjunctive usages, Chinese students often get confused and misuse them; students have vague understanding of the time concept indicated by the different tenses. Based on the analysis, the author tentatively provide some interpretations for these mistakes: many problems exist in the teaching of grammar in Chinese English teaching, and the teaching of tenses is not systematic and the focus of teaching and tests is not in accordance with the actual uses of tenses; students are affected by inter-lingual transfer and intra-lingual transfer when making English sentences. At last, some suggestions are offered by the author for the teaching of tenses: teachers should combine systematic teaching of tenses with the teaching of tenses in actual contexts and students should try to write English compositions using different tenses.
Highlights
The errors and mistakes committed by foreign language learners in the course of study are a universal concern of linguists and teachers of foreign languages
It is difficult for Chinese students to understand and accept the concept of tense owing to the fact that there is no tense in the Chinese language; on the other hand, there are altogether 16 tenses in English, each having more than one usages, so Chinese students are always confused with the various usages of different tenses
The simple present tense is used in this type of composition, and sometimes the simple past tense is used when the students are giving some past examples to illustrate their points of view
Summary
The errors and mistakes (abbreviated as errors only in the following part) committed by foreign language learners in the course of study are a universal concern of linguists and teachers of foreign languages. Tense is a main and difficult point to master for Chinese students of English. It is difficult for Chinese students to understand and accept the concept of tense owing to the fact that there is no tense in the Chinese language; on the other hand, there are altogether 16 tenses in English, each having more than one usages, so Chinese students are always confused with the various usages of different tenses. The article is intended to observe, classify and summarize these errors in the use of tenses in Chinese students’ compositions, with the purpose of finding some regularity in them, analyzing the causes of these errors and proposing some suggestions for the teaching of tenses. The concept of tense discussed here is the concept of tense in traditional English grammar, namely, the combination of tense and aspect. For the purpose of economy, tense is used throughout the article for the concept of the combination of tense and aspect
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
