The Acquisition of English Verb Tense and Aspect of L2 Learners

Abstract

This study explored the acquisition of English verb tense and aspect of L2 learners. Further, the present study sought to understand the representation and interpretation of the tense-aspect system, as well as the difficulties encountered by the Grade 10 L2 learners at Magallanes National Vocational High School in the grammatical and lexical aspects of verbs. Thus, a qualitative research design was utilized to comprehend the process of making sense of the tenseaspect from the perspective of the students. Subsequently, content and corpus analyses were employed to determine if the learners acquired the tense-aspect in the appropriate context in the 29 pieces of a narrative essay written by the students and answering a cloze test. To validate the significant data gathered from the corpus, an unstructured interview was also conducted. The results revealed that the learners have remarkably acquired the grammatical structures but exhibited confusion about the rules that made them apply the verb tense and aspect to unsuitable contexts. Moreover, the findings also showed that the students' concept of tense and aspect was similar to their knowledge of verbs in the L1 which is a strong implication of language transfer and entails errors in language use. Hence, this study recommended exposing L2 learners to language-teaching contexts where the grammatical structures and functions of verb tense and aspect are highly emphasized.