The present study is designed to test how Korean-speaking young learners of English make the aspectual distinctions and how they talk about the past events. An experiment was conducted on 65 learners of English in grade 3 and 7 returnees, asking them to describe 19 film clips in English and Korean. The results demonstrated that the classroom young learners showed biased distribution in the use of tense and aspect morphology in English: They used the progressive-ing predominantly on activity verbs and past forms primarily on achievement verbs. Regarding viewpoint distinctions for the given events, they were guided by inherent lexical aspect of verbs rather than actual situational properties of the events, and failed to distinguish between different viewpoints, apparently not knowing the meaning or function of the progressive-ing. A comparison across the Korean task and the English task revealed that the use of tense-aspect morphology is universal in that progressive forms are used mostly for activities and past forms primarily for achievements, but language-dependent in that the same events of accomplishments are described differently in L1 and L2. This is interpreted as evidence that the development of the interlanguage system is autonomous of the mother tongue.
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