L1 Influence on Use of Tense/Aspect by Chinese and Japanese Learners of English

要旨

This paper analyzes tense and aspect errors extracted from a small-scale parallel corpus of translations by advanced English learners. L1 Chinese and L1 Japanese learners are shown to produce a number of distinctive error trends that can plausibly be linked to L1 characteristics, thus suggesting transfer effects. Chinese learners of English display characteristic misuse of the modal verbs would and will to express habituality, reflecting overgeneralization of the Chinese modal verb huì. Japanese learners of English omit will in future contexts, reflecting the non-obligatory nature of comparable marking in Japanese. Errors involving will are thus in complementary distribution. In addition, while learners share a tendency to omit past tense morphology, Japanese learners in particular show L1-like tense marking in relative clauses, reflecting differing tense systems in Japanese and English. In contrast, common errors reflect more universal factors. For both groups of learners, omissions of past tense morphology largely occur with verbs expressing non-prototypical (stative, habitual, and/or backgrounded) events, providing support for Andersen’s (2002) hypothesis linking the accuracy of tense/aspect marking and event prototypicality. This paper’s findings suggest that L1 influence interacts with more general phenomena to constitute “error profiles” characteristic to learners of a certain L1 background, and that it is therefore desirable to give greater consideration to learners’ L1 when considering language pedagogy.

主題