Abstract
The present study aims to investigate the performance of Taiwan high school EFL students in the use of English tense and aspect forms. Our purposes are to identify the possible reasons for committing such errors, to understand the strategies that students take in the process of learning, to compare the differences between high and low language proficiency students, and to offer some implications to promote the efficiencies in teaching English tenses and aspects.The subjects of the study consist of 172 senior high school students and l29 junior high school students in Chia-yi area. Nine English tense and aspect forms are intentionally arranged in a translation test with six short paragraphs in it. Al1 of the errors are classified into seven categories.The results indicate that the four highest error frequencies in the use of tenses and aspect forms, ranking in descending order, are (1) the present perfect progressive, (2) the future perfect, (3) the past perfect, and (4) the present perfect. Among the seven error types classified in the study, tense and aspect misuse ranks the highest, and its error percentage is far higher than the other error types. It suggests that many of the senior and junior high school students in our study have difficulties in correctly using English tense and aspect forms, especially the present perfect progressive and the perfect forms.It is also observed that the absolute tenses, the misuse of the simple present and the simple past for each other is the commonest error type in both junior and senior high school students’ data. Misusing the simple present for the simple past may be interference from mother tongue because there is no inflectional paradigm in Mandarin, or may be because of direct translation from Chinese interpretation in the translation test.For the relative tenses, some of the junior high school students misuse the simple present and the simple past for the present perfect and the past perfect, and some of them misuse the present perfect and the past perfect for the future perfect. On the other hand, many of the senior high school students misuse the present perfect for the past perfect and the future perfect. The results indicate that some of the junior high school students may lack the notion of reference time, and many others wrongly perceive it in the test. The wrong perception of reference time can also be observed in the senior high school students’ data.As for the imperfective aspects, to our surprise, the performance in the present progressive is similar in the two-stage students. Except the present perfect progressive, the lower error frequencies in the present progressive and the past progressive suggest that the EFL students can comprehend the aspect better than the tense, because Mandarin is a tenseless language and native speakers emphasize the use of the aspectual mechanism in their expressions more.Furthermore, the comparison between the junior and senior high school students also exhibits that the senior high school students actually make significant progress in the use of tenses and aspects. Besides, the correlation between the performance of the translation test and the students’ English grades in general shows high positive correlation in the junior high school students and medium positive correlation in the senior high schoo1 students.The findings in our study lead us to submit some proposals and suggestions as a general reference to those who are interested in teaching or doing researches on English tense and aspect forms. In terms of research, we propose to incorporate a contrastive analysis between the tense and aspect system of English and Chinese so that we can locate the sources of interference and find remedies. Meanwhile, discourse analysis will also be helpful in comprehensively understanding the interaction between the temporal relations of events in the contexts. Pedagogically speaking, the teacher’s clear lecture and comparison of the uses each tense and aspect form will provide an effective illustration and exemplification of the abstract relationship of verb tenses and aspects. Communicative approach, emphasizing the authentic use of the language, may also offer such an illustration and exemplification as well.