A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of Simple Past Tense In Their Oral Narrative Discourse

This study was undertaken to investigate the use of simple past tense by Chinese EFL learners in their oral narrative discourse in a testing context. It seeks to describe the general characteristics of test-takers'use of simple past tense in their oral production driven by the task of story-retelling, and explore the differences in the use of simple past tense across learners of different levels. The ultimate purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between the use of simple past tense and the learners'oral performances.The materials employed in the study were 60 cases taken from SWECCL, a Chinese learner corpus. On the basis of the test-takers'oral performances on the TEM-Band 4 Oral Test, the sampled cases were divided into high- and low-level groups. The data analysis yielded the following major findings:Firstly, of all the occurrences of different tenses, simple past tense enjoys the highest frequency of use in the learners'narrative discourse. Of all the verbs identified in the sampled cases, simple tense accounts for 56.41%. Such a tendency is related to the effect of the task that requires the test-takers to reproduce the story in which the past tense is overwhelmingly used to tell the personal past experiences.Secondly, the use of past tense by the test-takers in the task of story retelling can be categorized into two broad types: simple past tense intended to describe past actions and past states, and they could be further divided into 4 sub-types: habitual past actions, specific past actions, and habitual past states and specific past states.Case analysis indicates that verbs of past actions were used more than those of past states, suggesting that the use of past tense was influenced by the original story to be reproduced, on the one hand, and that the learners were cognitively aware of how the personal past experiences were represented in the use of past tense, on the other. Such a finding could be supported by the occurrences of subtypes of the past actions and past states: Of all the identified instances of past actions, specific past actions were used much more frequently than habitual ones (58.32% and 5.32% respectively). Similarly, specific past states enjoy a higher frequency of use than habitual past states.Thirdly, the independent sample T-test reveals that there is significant difference between higher and lower achievers in the frequency of use of simple past tense and the frequency distribution of each type (except verbs describing habitual past states). The possible explanation for this is that higher achievers were linguistically proficient enough to allocate their attentional resources to both the use of past tense and the content of the original story, whereas low achievers were likely to allocate much of their attention to the story content. The micro-analysis conducted in some of lower-level cases indicates that the lower achievers tended to use more verbs of habitual past actions and states than the higher achievers. In addition, their production was in general smaller in length in comparison with higher achievers', naturally leading to the lower frequency of use of past tense.Finally, the correlation analysis indicates that the use of simple past tense is positively correlated with the test-takers'oral performances, suggesting that the use of past tense may become an effective indicator of EFL learners'oral performances.Pedagogically, from the teacher's perspective, the use of simple past tense can be used as one of the effective means in oral assessment. From the learners'perspective, learning effort should be directed to their awareness of the use of more specific past actions or states in the narrative discourse.