Numerical/Visual Elaboration of the Temporal Distance in Teaching Tense-Aspect Distinctions in English

Abstract

Teaching the English tense-aspect system is a challenging problematic area in that its acquisition is a major source of error for English L2 learners at all levels, which signals the need for a central focus on establishing form-meaning connections. A wise strategy would be the application of deliberate simplification of the linguistic material only to rectify it at later stages. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the ways to benefit from the distance as a metaphorical link between the past and present for its facilitation effect on learning the present, past and present perfect tenses. The distance was elaborated numerically and visually but the elaboration was kept to be minimum. The links were created between the visual and numerical cues and the target forms through shared partial similarities to help associate the temporal meanings with the auxiliary forms of 'be' and 'do', and the inflection markers of '-ed' and -s. In a nonequivalent comparison-group design, ANCOVA and Kruskas-Wallis revealed the experimental group's significantly better performance in tense-aspect distinctions as regards temporal meanings. The results have implications for both temporal and nontemporal meanings (e.g. temporal, social or psychological distances). Being visual and numerical, cues can be universally applied to diverse contexts.