A Study On The Temporal Use Of High School Students In English

The acquisition of tense is the focal point as well as a different point in the senior high school English teaching. So a study on the acquisition law of tense is beneficial to the English tense teaching in senior high school. Specifically, the present study tries to answer the following questions:First, what are the respective features of the tense marker usage in different grade levels?Second, are there any differences of the tense marker usage in different grade levels?Third, if any, what are the underlying reasons for those differences?The present study derives nourishment from previous research methods on tense. The study subjects are the students of three grades from the eighteenth middle school in Zaozhuang city, each grade consists of two parallel classes with 30 students respectively, so a total of 180 students are examined. The research data is based upon the writings from pictures of those 180 students. The research procedures lie in the following three aspects: first, date coding, including the temporal types of predicate verbs, temporal adverbials, sentence types, and discourse structures; second, data sorting and counting, data processing is operated with the help of SPSS,and the data results are presented in tables; third, data analysis, based on the data the features of tense use in different grades, both common and different points, as well as the underlying causes are analyzed, which further contribute to the conclusion of the regular characteristics of tense acquisition of high school students.After a close comparison and analysis of the tense usage in different grades, the major findings of this study are presented as follows:The similarities of tense usage among the three grades:(1) when expressing past time,temporal adverbials, simple sentences, compound sentences and compound predicate sentences mainly apply past tense and simple present tense;(2) there are different tendencies on tense usage between verbs closing to subjects and those verbs just the reverse in compound sentences and compound predicate sentences, to be specific, the past tense and present tense are often used interchangeably by students of all the three grades, and the accuracy rate of tense usage associated with verbs close to subjects is much higher than others;(3) the use of tense of all the three grades basically support the discourse hypothesis, students tend to apply simple present tense in the background part, while apply past tense in the foreground part.The differences of tense usage among the three grades:(1) the usage frequency and accuracy of tense are different in temporal adverbials, simple sentences, compound sentences as well as discourse structures in different grades, the overall condition shows that the usage ofpresent tense is the highest in grade one, then grade three, and the last one is grade two while the usage of past tense is the lowest in grade one, then grade three, the highest is grade two;(2)the usage accuracy of both past tense and present tense is highest in grade two, grade three comes second, and the lowest is in grade one.The differences of tense usage among the three grades may be caused by the following two major elements:(1) decided by the repeatability and phase features of interlanguage;(2)students among different grades shows different cognition and perception levels on the manners expressing time in Chinese and English, they also show some differences referring to the corresponding understanding, memory and master degree.The general tendency of tense acquisition among the three grades develops continuously,but during the period of grade three the development is unsmooth, however, it is still in line with the development trend of interlanguage.