English Past Tense Morphology in Adult Arab EFL learners: Mental Representation Mechanism and Types of Errors

Muneera Muftah

doi:10.24297/jal.v6i3.4666

Abstract

English past tense morphology is one of the most difficult but yet one of the most important areas in the acquisition of English language by L2 Learners. The objectives of this study were to: (a) determine the acquisition sequence of English regular and irregular past tense forms in adult Arab EFL learners; (b) identify whether English past tense forms are represented by a single mechanism or a dual mechanism, and (c) investigate types of errors that L2 learners produce in their acquisition of English past tense morphology. In total, 77 adult Arab EFL learners participated in an oral production task. The use of the verbal inflectional morphemes in obligatory contexts in each learners production is examined. The results show that L2 learners acquire the past tense morphology of the regular verbs before they acquire the past tense morphology of the irregular verbs and that there is frequency effect for the irregular verbs, but not for the regular verbs. This indicates that the dual system theory accounts for the mental representations of English past tense forms for the L2 learners in this study. The most frequent error types produced by the Learners are omission, overregularization and overgeneration of be forms.

Highlights

The distinction made between the first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition is due to the fact that L2 acquisition appears to be different from the acquisition of L1 especially after the critical period (Towell and Hawkins, 1994: 2)
The present study focuses on the acquisition of past tense morphology of the English regular and irregular verbs among 77 adult Arab EFL learners
The results show that omission was greater for the irregular past tense forms (26.09% for the AG, 35.00% for the upper-intermediate group (UIG) and 52.35% for the LIG) than for regular past tense forms (14.21% for the AG, 33.68% for the UIG and 51.34% for the LIG) across the three groups of learners with the lower-intermediate group having the highest omission rate for both regular and irregular verb form morphemes

Summary

Introduction

The distinction made between the first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition is due to the fact that L2 acquisition appears to be different from the acquisition of L1 especially after the critical period (Towell and Hawkins, 1994: 2). L2 acquisition is a lengthy, highly idiosyncratic and difficult as well as incomplete process. These major distinctions have lead L2 acquisition theorists to claim that L2 acquisition process can take up to seven or more years for a learner to develop proficiency, depending on the age (Alvara, 2003: 157). If there is a similarity in the structure of the L2 with the L1, the acquisition process will be a lot easier, and if otherwise, it will be more difficult

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion