Narrative Structure and Task Type in the Acquisition of the English Past Progressive

Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of the past progressive aspect by Korean learners of English as a second language by examining discourse-level use of the past progressive. The study explores in which context the learners would use the past progressive compared to the simple past. Twenty- four learners were engaged in two elicitation tasks: a verb cloze passage task and a film retell task. The two different tasks yielded results which suggest strong influences of task types on their use of the English past progressive. Based on the results, the study suggests that in a language classroom, the progressive aspect should be practiced with different types of tasks for learners to expand on the restricted associations between lexical aspect and tense-aspect morphology. Furthermore, the study argues that the past progressive should be taught through exposure to and engagement with meaningful narrative discourse to help learners understand grammar more fully.