會議論文

學年 92
學期 2
發表日期 2004-05-28
作品名稱 A corpus study of lexical aspect and its influence on Taiwan english learner's underuse of english past tense markings
作品名稱(其他語言)
著者 Huang, Ping-yu
作品所屬單位 淡江大學英文學系
出版者 Tamshui, Taipei : Tamkang University
會議名稱 淡江大學網路英語教學國際會議=ELT and E-learning in an electronic age: issues and alternatives
會議地點 臺北縣, 臺灣
摘要 According to Granger (1994), L2 learner corpora provide SLA researchers "better insights into the interlanguage of the foreign language learner" (p. 25). To probe into Taiwan English L2 learners' underuse of past tense markings in their interlanguage, a corpus study was conducted with the results reported in this paper. Basically, in the research, I investigated the influence of lexical aspect on L2 learners' underuse of past markers. As Comrie (1976) indicated, the definition of lexical aspect refers to "inherent aspectual (i .e. semantic aspectual) properties" implied in verbs (p. 47). More specifically, verbs (or predicates) in a language can be categorized into four types based on the lexical aspect they denote: states (e.g. know and like), activities (e.g. play and swim), accomplishments (e.g. run a mile and write a paper), and achievements (e.g. die and notice). In the past twenty years, a great number of studies have been carried out to investigate the correlation between lexical aspect and temporal markings that L2learners used and most of them confirmed lexical aspect indeed has effects on L2 learners' use of tense-aspect markers (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig and Reynolds, 1995; Flashner, 1982; Kumpf, 1982; Huang, 1999; Lee, 2001; Robison, 1995). That is, as these researchers claimed, L2 learners were prone to using past tense markings with accomplishments and achievements while tending to associate progressive markers with activities. According, it is logical to hypothesize the types of verbs L2 learners would forget to add past markings to are stative and activity verbs. The present research was conducted to examine this hypothesis by looking into the data stored in an L2 learner corpus called English TLC (English Taiwan Learner Corpus) which contains nearly two million words written by Taiwan English L2 students. For this study, forty-five essays were randomly chosen from English TLC and, totally, 104 tokens of verbs that students underused past tense markings with were collected and classified into lexical aspectual classes. As the results showed, not surprisingly, most of them are stative and activity verbs (86 tokens). The findings in the study suggest there is actually a need for English instructors to remind their students to attach past tense markers to states and activities when these verbs are used in past contexts. To do this, some computer interfaces are introduced in this paper as well to let Taiwan English teachers know how to help their students avoid underusing past tense markings with stative and activity verbs.
關鍵字
語言 en
收錄於
會議性質 國際
校內研討會地點 淡水校園
研討會時間 20040528~20040529
通訊作者
國別 TWN
公開徵稿 Y
出版型式 紙本
出處 淡江大學網路英語教學國際會議=ELT and E-learning in an electronic age: issues and alternatives, 15p.
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