| The present study was carried out to discover English tense and aspect usage in controlled written discourse by non-native speakers at the college level. The findings would provide ESL teachers with additional knowledge for the improvement of teaching tense and aspect usage in written discourse.;The subjects participating in this study were 11 Japanese students enrolled in the English classes at the English Language Institute at Illinois State University in the 1988 academic year. They individually took two modified cloze tests in expository discourse and participated in a stimulated recall immediately after each test. The recall was audiotaped. The same tests were administered to 11 professors and doctoral students in the English Department at the same university. This was done to establish the native speakers' norms of usage. The norm for each verb form was established if 70% of the native speakers agreed with the form. The non-native speakers' choice was then compared to the norm. Data included the choice of tense and aspect as well as explanations for their choices.;It was found that the non-native speakers had more problems with the present perfective than with the simple present and the simple past. They based their choices of tense and aspect on linguistic forms in the immediate context, e.g., time adverbials and verb forms. The native speakers relied on similar factors, but they also focused on temporal consistency in the same discourse structure.;It can be concluded from the study that for the selection of tense and aspect in written discourse, the non-native speakers tend to rely on the local level of linguistic forms in context, whereas the proficient native speakers use both local and global levels of linguistic environment. |
