Teaching grammar and English as a second language: past and present tense

Introduction

Teaching grammar as part of ESL programs is important; While it is a debated topic, it has been shown that second language “natural learners” do not become proficient in the language if they do not understand the basic structure provided by grammar studies. Hinkel and Fotos (2002) point out that people during a “critical period” of 15 years are at risk of suffering from this problem, as are people who acquire enough of the second language to be able to communicate even with grammatical deficiencies, and many people English as a second language learners do not receive the negative feedback that would let them know that they are doing something wrong that they would receive in a structured situation (18).

The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the literature to demonstrate the importance of paying full attention to tense.

Literature review

Plotnik discusses the effect of time: all narration has a base time, one that moves the action of communication forward. The use of time sets the mood for the conversation or story being told; the past tense is traditionally the narrator’s medium, in which events have taken place and people have enacted their destiny. There is a finite basis for expired time. The present tense, on the other hand, promotes a feeling or mood of immediacy and the potential for change or flexibility (Plotnik, 2003).

According to Mc Carthy and Carter (2002), communication involves relational aspects and the desire to express oneself politely and indirectly (as opposed to bluntly), many times it manifests itself in tense forms that are part of the knowledge of the correct grammatical construction. These include verbs in a progressive context like wanting, liking, having to, etc. The time range helps people create communication with relational and interpersonal meaning. The time-talking strategy creates a relationship between the speaker, the event, and the listener that can engage or separate the event participants and each other. Understanding and correctly using the past and present tense has the potential to significantly increase not only the effective communication of verbal and written messages, but also to correctly and proactively establish relational aspects of events and situations that are an important part of grammar instruction. proactive.

Limitations in the development of the affix of past tense in English have been well documented in ESL students in a variety of language tasks, including spontaneous conversations, provoked productions, sentence completion, sentence recall, production of nonsense forms, samples of writing and grammaticality. trials. Specifically, “the morphophonological component of time marking in English represents the patterns that children need to extract from input to produce the various forms associated with past tense. Specifically, children have to learn to ‘add’ to the roots of regular verbs and recognize the various alternative phonological processes involved in the indication of the past tense of irregular verbs “.

There is a semantic contrast between verb tenses under three headings, location in time, factuality, and backward movement. The primary use of the past tense indicates a situation where “actions, events, processes, relationships, states of affairs, or whatever a clause expresses” are dynamic (in which case they ‘take place’) or static, in which case ‘get’ … Past tense can be indicated more directly by an expression that includes time such as ‘yesterday’, a definite time in which the subject of the sentence occurred. The use of comments in the past tense about something that has happened, but does not necessarily indicate that the situation continues in the present.

Huddleston (1984) pointed out that past tense is an inherently relational concept; the inflection of the past tense indicates that the moment when the situation or even took place has passed in relation to another moment, usually at the moment when the sentence is said or written. The time of the situation in present tense will normally be present or future, and can also be expressed in temporal terms (like now, next week) or by a subordinate when clause such as ‘when I get here, I’ll talk to her’, indicating future. An important use of the subordinate clause is restricted to cases where the future situation in which the predicted event will occur is assured: Huddleston uses the example “He is sick next week” as a meaningless misuse of present tense in opposition to action. verb in “We are leaving for Paris next week” (145). This example shows how misuse of the past and present tense can not only affect communication and understanding, but also has the potential to affect the “face” of the speaker / writer in social and work settings.

Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartik (1995) identified five main classes of alternations used in the elaboration of past participles in English.

The first class includes all regular verbs (e.g., Clean, kick, smash) and a large set of irregular verbs, and is made up of those verbs whose past tense and past participle forms are identical (e.g., Brought, built, trapped, had, left, kept, said, taught, thought, said). The second class contains high-frequency irregular verbs, such as hit, cut, and put, which remain unchanged in their present, past, or past participle forms. For a third class of irregular verbs, the past participle is generated by affixing -en to its past tense form. This class includes verbs such as hit, broken, spoken, stolen. For the fourth class of irregular verbs, the morpheme -en is added to the present tense form (eg, Blown, eaten, taken, thrown). A final class of irregular verbs uses participle forms that are distinct from their present and past tense forms (eg, state, drunk, gone, written, ridden).

Redmond (2003) points out that the production of the past participle in English requires mastery of four advanced grammatical contexts: the passive, the present perfect, the past perfect, and the past modal. From syntactic and semantic perspectives, each use is considered complex relative to simple active sentences because they require speakers to coordinate multiple relationships between tense, voice, aspect, and mood within the verb phrase.

Ionin and Wexler’s 2002 research among 20 children learning English as a second language found that they almost never produce the wrong tense / agreement morphology. In addition, the researchers noted, “L2 students use supplemental inflection at a significantly higher rate than affix inflection, and overgenerate auxiliary forms in expressions that lack progressive participles (eg, they are helpers).

A grammaticality judgment task of English tense / concordance morphology similarly shows that children learning ESL are significantly more sensitive to ‘paradigm of being’ than to thematic verb inflection. These findings suggest that the verb tense is present in students’ grammar and that it is exemplified through forms of the auxiliary be. It is argued that the omission of inflection is due to problems with the realization of surface morphology … It is further suggested that second language students initially associate morphological agreement with verb elevation and therefore they acquire forms of being before the morphology of the inflection in situ. thematic verbs (95).

Conclution

Correct use of verb tense is an important skill for adult ESL individuals to have and the lesson plans developed to address this directly will help them communicate effectively with their co-workers and people in the community about what to do next. they want and need, what they have had. And they have done and also to establish their identity based on their past history and future wishes.

It is important for ESL students to learn grammar so that they can express personal thoughts in the proper syntax. Effective use of syntax is important for displaying different attitudes and expressing power and identity. Some incorrect forms of grammar can even be interpreted by the listener / reader as rude or impolite. The more precisely an individual can express his thoughts and meanings, the more effective his communication will be and the more potential for success he will have in his interpersonal and business communications throughout his life.

References

Hinkel E. and Fotos, S. (Eds.) (2002). New perspectives on the teaching of grammar in second language classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erbaum Associates.

Huddleston, R. (1984). Introduction to the grammar of English. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ionin, T. and Wexler, K. (2002). Why ‘is’ easier than ‘-s’ ?: Acquisition of time / concordance morphology by children learning English as a second language. Second Language Research, 18 (2): 95-136.

McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. (2002). Ten criteria for a spoken grammar. In: Hinkel E. and Fotos, S. (Eds.) New perspectives on the teaching of grammar in second language classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erbaum Associates.

Plotnik, A. (2003). Time counts! Writer, 116 (10): 17-18.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1995). A complete grammar of the English language. New York: Longman.

Redmond, SM (2003). Children’s productions of the affix -added in contexts of past tense and past participle. Speech, Language, and Hearing Resources Journal, 46 (5): 1095-109.

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