The Use of Past Tense Forms by Japanese Learners of English

Abstract

Why do Japanese-speaking learners of English have difficulties in acquiring the use of proper tense forms in English? This is a report on a study of the use of the past tense forms in the 53 Japanese samples compiled for the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) project. The research questions were: 1) to what extent do Japanese-speaking learners of English use the past tense forms correctly? and 2) does the lexical meaning of verbs affect the learners’ use of the past tense verbs? The data were tagged for the correct and incorrect use of the past tense forms of regular verbs, irregular verbs, be forms, and auxiliary verbs in obligatory context and for erroneous uses of past tense forms in non-obligatory context. Frequencies and concordance analyses were utilized to determine the use of the target language forms. Some of the interesting findings are: 1) the learners used various types of past tense forms correctly only 50 to 66 % of the time, and 2) they often failed to mark past tense forms of state verbs, especially those expressing “feeling.” An additional tendency found was that they have difficulty in sustaining the correct past tense forms in embedded sentences except when using when adverbial clauses.