Tense Errors Research Articles

The noticeability and effectiveness of corrective feedback in relation to target type

This quasi-experimental study investigated the noticeability and effectiveness of three corrective feedback (CF) techniques (recasts, prompts and a combination of the two) delivered in the language classroom. The participants were four groups of high-beginner college level francophone learners of English as a second language (ESL) ( n = 99) and their teachers. Each teacher was assigned to a treatment condition that fit his CF style, but the researcher taught the controls. CF was provided to the learners in response to their production problems with the simple past and questions in the past. While the noticing of CF was assessed through immediate recall protocols, learning outcomes were measured by way of picture description and spot-the-differences tasks administered through a pre-test/post-test design. The results indicated that the noticeability of CF is dependent on the grammatical target it addresses (i.e. feedback on past tense errors was noticed more) and that the CF techniques that push learners to self-correct alone or in combination with target exemplars are more effective in bringing out the corrective intent of the feedback move. In relation to the learning outcomes, the past tense accuracy levels increased more than those for questions, but the differences between the two targets were not significant across groups.

Ungrammatical Patterns in Chinese EFL Learners’ Free Writing

This paper investigated a number of common ungrammatical patterns that were found in Chinese EFL leaners’ free writings, in order to find useful pedagogical implications for English grammar teaching in EFL setting, especially in China. The corpus of writing data is examined by the author together with a native English teacher. Our findings suggest that misuse of determiners is the most frequent grammatical error in Chinese students’ writing. Other ungrammatical patterns such as Chinese-English expression, tense error, misuse of prepositions, are also considerably important and should be given due attention by EFL teachers, especially Chinese EFL teachers in their teaching practice.

Performance of preschool children with normal language development in past tense task

The acquisition of tense inflection is a gradual process, and the children appear unaware of the significance of inflectional endings, without recognizing that there is a general rule for deriving one form from another. To investigate the ability of past tense in children with normal language development (NLD). The subjects were 30 children with NLD, aged between 4 and 6 years. To evaluate the use of past tense, we developed a test composed of 30 regular and irregular verbs. The analysis of the answers considered the correct ones, the replacement, overregularization and errors. The 4 years old children with NLD had worse performance than the children of 5 and 6 years in correct answers and total score. There was no difference between the numbers of replacement based on age. By the age of 4, we observed more tense inflection errors. The overregularization errors did not differ between age groups. By the age of 4, children had more regular than irregular verbs correct answers. The 4 years old children with NLD had worse performance than 5 and 6 years old children, because they are still improving the use of verbs in their productions. At this age, we observed tense inflection errors. The 5 and 6 years old children already master the skill of past tense and do not differenciate.

Conditional and future tense impairment in non-fluent aphasia

Background: Morphological errors of tense and agreement are salient in agrammatic aphasia. The PADILIH predicts impairments in discourse linking that translate to greater difficulties in referring to a past event time than to a future or a present event time. In Catalan, the Periphrastic conditional tense (e.g., “if the man had had time, he would have…”) refers to the past and the Simple conditional tense refers to the future (e.g., “if the man had time, he would…”). These two tenses refer to an event that may happen (irrealis).Aims: We fill in the gap of the conditional tense and provide further data to study contrasts in verb inflection for time reference. We predict that verb forms that refer to an irrealis past event (Periphrastic conditional) are more impaired than forms that refer to an irrealis future event (Simple conditional and Future). We also predict that there are no differences between verb forms that refer to an irrealis future event (Simple conditional and Future). We also assessed whether problems in time reference extend to individuals with non-fluent aphasia that are not typical agrammatic Broca aphasia.Methods & Procedures: A sentence completion task that included 60 sentences (20 per type) of equal length in a Conditional structure (if-sentences) was designed. We tested three sentence types: Periphrastic conditional, Simple conditional and Future. The task was administered to nine participants with non-fluent aphasia and nine age-matched non-brain-damaged participants.Outcomes & Results: The Control group scored at ceiling on the three sentence types. Participants with non-fluent aphasia were most impaired in the production of the Periphrastic conditional as compared with the Simple conditional and the Future.Conclusions: When irrealis event times are compared, past events are more impaired than future events. These results can be explained by a deficit in time reference as predicted by the PADILIH. Our data reveal that the predictions of the PADILIH also hold for non-fluent speakers who have been diagnosed with Transcortical motor aphasia.

An Investigation of Syntactic Errors in Chinese Undergraduate EFL Learners’ Compositions: A Cohort Study

This paper reports on a study of syntactic errors in English essays composed by Chinese university students. Thirty undergraduate non-English majors across disciplines produced 90 essays on three tasks during eight weeks, and answered a self-developed questionnaire at the end of the course. Analyses of the data resulted in the following main findings: (1) Among the ten types of syntactic errors, errors in tense and voice were the most frequently occurring type of errors, (2) the errors generally tended to decrease across tasks, (3) the syntactic errors of various categories were generally inversely correlated with the students’ writing performance, and (4) the errors were caused by diverse reasons, of which carelessness and the differences between Chinese and English were considered the most crucial.

The Effects of Written Corrective Feedback Techniques on EFL Students’ Control over Grammatical Construction of Their Written English

There has been a controversy over the usefulness of the written corrective feedback (WCF) on the accuracy of ESL/EFL learners' writing – especially after Truscott's assertion that grammar correction is pointless and harmful (1996). This study presents the findings of an investigation of the impact of WCF on 90 intermediate Iranian EFL students. The participants were separated into three groups; then they randomly received direct, indirect or no correction feedback. They created three pieces of writing, pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test. Simple past tense errors were brought into focus in the feedback. The results showed that the recipients of WCF achieved more than those in the control group –suggesting the effectiveness of both kinds of WCF. Therefore, the provision of WCF should be regarded as a potentially valuable technique in instructing writing to EFL learners.

A Critique of Undergraduate Students’ Writing Skill in an ESL Setting: Samples from the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria

The importance of writing cuts across all levels of education. Its effectiveness hinges on the ability to use thegrammar of language appropriately especially in a second language (SL) situation. This paper compares the writingskill in English Language of eighty 100 level students and forty of those in 500 level core Agriculture colleges whowere randomly selected for grammatical assessment in a Nigerian University. The research was carried out after bothgroups had gone through English and Communication Skills courses. The results show that students have problemswith almost all aspects of grammar – tense, punctuation, spelling, concord, abbreviation, preposition, and wordamalgamation. At the 100 level, tense and spelling errors were the most frequent while punctuation and tense errorswere most prominent in 500 level scripts. Tense errors were common to both groups as a result of negative transferfrom the first language (L1), though the environment in which they occurred differ. The study also reveals animportant relationship between a mastery of the speaking skill and effective writing. The implications of the findingson the teaching and learning processes were discussed and suggestions were made on how to improve students’writing capability.

Diagnosing language impairment in bilinguals: Professional experience and perception

Diagnosing specific language impairment (SLI) in monolingual children is a complex task, with some controversy regarding criteria. Diagnosis of SLI in bilinguals is made more complex by the lack of standardized assessments and poor understanding of clinical markers in languages other than English. There is an added complexity when one of the languages being acquired is an endangered one, where the domains of use and input are restricted, and where input is affected by convergence with the majority language. This article explores the challenge facing speech and language therapists and psychologists in diagnosing SLI in bilingual children acquiring Irish and English. Six speech and language therapists and four psychologists took part in semi-structured interviews exploring the impact of the bilingual environment, the nature of bilingual language impairment, current practices and the needs of these children. Thematic analysis was carried out and here three of the main themes emerging in the areas of assessment, the bilingual environment and characteristics of language impairment in this population are discussed. For assessment, an overriding theme was the requirement of standardized testing to secure additional educational and therapy resources for these children. However, because there are no standardized tests available in Irish, both professions end up translating existing English-based language and psychological assessments, using the norms provided to achieve standard scores. Both professions expressed strong dissatisfaction with this practice but saw little choice, given the Department of Education’s approach to allocation of supports. Language impairment in Irish was characterized by lexical difficulties, particularly with verbs and prepositions, tense errors, and significant borrowing and code-switching with English. Other themes that emerged were the growing influence of English as the children became older, which affected both attitudes to the minority Irish language as well as the content and structure of the language itself. The implications for service provision for bilingual populations in general are outlined.

CLEC-based Study of Tense Errors in Chinese EFL Learners’ Writings

In this dissertation, we conduct error analysis of the learner’s writing competence based on Chinese Learner English Corpus. According to the data from CLEC, the verb error heads the list among the tagged errors of different parts of speech. To address this issue, we set the following as research question of this study: 1. Which kind of error occurs most frequently among the tense errors in the sample writings in CLEC? 2. Are there any differences in the tense errors students committed within limited time and unlimited time? The writer has conducted an empirical Error Analysis by integrating error statistics and the corpus-based approach. Specific data for analysis have been obtained from CLEC and compositions written by the freshmen of non-English majors in Inner Mongolia Finance and Economics College. After a thorough analysis, we get the following major findings: 1. On the whole, most of the sixteen categories of misuse of tenses are widespread among the five corpora. Although the students of each corpus have different language proficiencies, present tense and past tense are the two most frequently misused tenses in every corpus, while all kinds of future tenses except future tense itself and all kinds of past future tenses except past future tense itself are the least frequently misused tenses in each corpus. 2. Generally speaking, the sixteen categories of tense errors distribute more evenly in free writings and the error rates of the same tense are different in CLEC and in free writings, which shows that the time limit can indeed affect the students’ performance on tense errors. 3. The causes leading to verb errors are mother tongue influence, target language influence and cognitive factors.

Differentiating Children With and Without Language Impairment Based on Grammaticality

This study compared the diagnostic accuracy of a general grammaticality measure (i.e., percentage grammatical utterance; PGU) to 2 less comprehensive measures of grammaticality--a measure that excluded utterances without a subject and/or main verb (i.e., percentage sentence point; PSP) and a measure that looked only at verb tense errors (i.e., percentage verb tense usage; PVT)--in differentiating children with and without language impairment. Two groups of 3-year-olds, 17 with language impairment and 17 with typical language, participated in a picture description task. PGU, PSP, and PVT were computed. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses were conducted to determine the best cutoff value for each measure. All 3 measures demonstrated a sensitivity of 100%. PGU showed a specificity of 88%, and both PSP and PVT showed a specificity of 82%. In addition, PGU showed a larger positive likelihood ratio than the other 2 measures. PGU, PSP, and PVT were all sensitive to language impairment. However, PGU was less likely than PSP and PVT to misclassify children with typical language. The resultant diagnostic accuracy makes PGU an appropriate measure to use to screen for language impairment.

The Effects of Planned Focus on Form on Iranian EFL Learners’ Oral Accuracy

One of the limitations of the meaning focused instruction in an EFL situation such as Iran is that a communicative approach helps Iranian learners to become fluent, but is insufficient to ensure comparable levels of oral accuracy. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether planned focus on form, and also what type of corrective feedback, would be useful for Iranian EFL learners’ oral accuracy. To this end, the study employed a quasi experimental design. Three intact classes were randomly selected as the control group (n=17), recast group (n=19) as experimental group 1, and delayed explicit and metalinguistic group (n=21) as the experimental group 2 respectively. All groups participated in six sessions of the task of story retelling. For all groups, learners were asked to read and summarize their own assigned story in a time limit of four minutes and retell it to the class. For the recast group, students were provided with recasts on their simple past tense errors; for the delayed explicit and metalinguistic group, the researcher corrected the learners' errors after they finished the retelling; and for the control group, there were no feedback on learners' errors. Learners’ improvement was measured by their oral accuracy during the six sessions of story retelling. One-way ANOVAs with post hoc comparisons indicated that all CF groups significantly outperformed the control group in the session six of story retelling and that the two feedback types were equally effective in promoting learners’ oral accuracy. These findings suggest that the planned focus on form can be an effective tool for the development of oral accuracy in the EFL situations. It can also be concluded that intensive recasts which are repeatedly focused on a particular structure are not different from explicit types of feedback in terms of their effectiveness.

An Analysis of English Tense and Aspect Errors in Korean-English Translation

An Analysis of English Tense and Aspect Errors in Korean-English Translation

Grammatical errors produced by English majors: The translation task

This study investigated the frequency of the grammatical errors related to the four categories of preposition, relative pronoun, article, and tense using the translation task. In addition, the frequencies of these grammatical errors in different categories and in each category were examined. The quantitative component of the study further looked at the differences between literature and translation students in the frequencies in different categories. A total of 60 junior EFL students (30 literature and 30 translation), all studied at Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, participated in this survey. Four translation tests, three in Persian and one in English, were given to the participants to investigate the difficulties of the Persian native speakers learning English. This study showed that the students had the most number of errors in preposition (100.0%), relative pronoun (56.7%), article (25.0%), and tense (6.7%) respectively. The results also revealed that there is a statistically significant difference between the frequencies of the grammatical errors in each category. Furthermore, there is also a statistically significant difference between literature and translation students in the frequencies in different categories.

Factors affecting the production of verb inflections in Greek aphasia

Verb inflection errors are commonly observed in the speech of aphasic individuals, but the errors are selective and not evenly distributed across different functional categories (e.g., Friedman & Grodzinsky, 1997). An investigation of verb inflection errors in seven Greek aphasic individuals showed more errors in aspect and tense than in agreement (Varlokosta et al., 2006). Moreover, the productions revealed a large proportion of repetition and lexical errors in addition to pure inflectional errors. The presence of different types of errors raises the question of the nature of the underlying deficit in the production of the functional categories. An erroneous production of a verb may involve an error in morphological suffixation, preserving the verb stem; an error in lexical selection, preserving the inflection; and a mixed error, involving both the morphological suffixation and the verb stem. Because all verbs in Greek are affixed, a bare stem is not a possibility as it would result in an illegal word. According to Levelt’s (1999) model of word production, morphological suffixation errors indicate a breakdown at the level of diacritical (lexical–semantic) features, whereas lexical and mixed lexical–morphological errors reflect additional difficulty in lexical selection. Repetition errors involve the least amount of computation and thus may indicate a difficulty in affixation during phonological encoding. To address the above question, we re-examined the productions of the Greek speaking aphasic individuals studied by Varlokosta et al. (2006) by re-classifying the errors as morphological, lexical, or mixed. A second aim was to examine the contributions of severity of spoken language impairment, verb familiarity, regularity, and presence of consonant cluster to the performance per functional category.

Verbal Syntax and Morphology in Typically Developing Dutch Children and Children With Sli: How Developmental Data Can Play an Important Role In Morphological Theory

Abstract. This paper is a study of normal and impaired (SLI) linguistic development, especially in verbal morphology and syntax. The paper studies both linguistic development and how developmental phenomena provide evidence for adult linguistic theory. We use extensive developmental data to test models of normal and impaired development that have been applied to other languages—in particular, the Agr/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). We develop detailed models of Dutch morphology that—together with ATOM—predict that Dutch‐speaking children will produce more root infinitives than English‐speaking children. Furthermore, the model predicts particular errors of tense and agreement will occur in Dutch but not English‐speaking children. These predictions are confirmed. We also investigate how developmental data can help us to solve a problem concerning the interpretation of features in adult morphology.