The Acquisition of Past Temporality by Two ESL Learners at Different Levels of Proficiency

Abstract

The acquisition of English past temporality has been a topic of discussion in the second language acquisition field. Most of the studies have looked at a case study or a group of learners of the same level of proficiency. The findings indicated that learners with low proficiency level keep relying on using the lexical means as their verbal morphology begin established. No study has compared between two case studies or two group of different level of proficiency to find whether this phenomenon can be true with learners of different level of proficiency. This study sought to find this by examining the development of English past temporality with two case studies of learners of English as a second language. Each learner was interviewed for 20 minutes. The results indicated that there is a difference between the two learners in terms of the level of English past temporality mastery. However, it was found that even the second learner has reached a level of mastery of English past temporality; he still relies on using the lexical means.