The Use Of Past Tense In Chinese EFL Learners' Spoken English—From The Perspective Of The Temporality Of English And The Spatiality Of Chinese

The appropriate use of tense remains one of the grave difficulties for Chinese EFL learners.However,most of the domestic research concerning the use of English tense just focuses on the common features of language acquisition.Although some studies have investigated the influence of language transfer,such as the influence of Chinese perfective aspect marker "le" upon Chinese EFL learners' use of English simple past,there has been little theoretical discussion about the difficulties of Chinese EFL learners' use of English tense.Therefore,from the perspective of the crucial difference between the temporal trait in English and the spatial one in Chinese suggested by Wang Wenbin(2013a,2013b),the present thesis tries to probe into Chinese learners' use of past tense by looking into advanced Chinese EFL learners' spoken English.It also attempts to analyze the deep reasons behind the misuses of past tense produced by Chinese EFL learners.The working hypothesis this thesis proposes is that the frequent misuses of past tense observed in Chinese EFL learners'spoken output can be attributed to the language transfer of Chinese representations lacking past tense markers attached to verbs,the fundamental cause of which is Chinese people's spatial mode of thinking.This research adopts a corpus-based approach to test this hypothesis.First,it selects some data from SECCL 2.0 by equidistant sampling and tags the tense use of verbs.Then.the research calculates the use of tense by concordancing.Finally,by a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of Chinese EFL learners,spoken output of English past tense,the present study tries to examine the relationships between Chinese EFL learners' use of past tense and the English and Chinese peculiarities involving the discrepancies of temporality and spatiality.The main findings obtained by this study can be summarized as follows:(1)it continues to be a big problem with the use of past tense by advanced Chinese EFL learners in their spoken English,with a ratio of 2:1 between the correct use of past tense and the misuse of present tense as past tense;(2)The Chi-square test result(X2=12.324 P<0.001)shows that there is a significant difference between the errors involving the past tense use of be and those involving lexical verbs,with be's past tense more likely to be misused;(3)Chinese EFL learners tend to use past tense correctly at the beginning of utterances and then misuse present tense as past tense,and this situation shows up twice as much as the opposite excluding the effect of be.It is believed by this research that there are three main reasons that can account for the phenomena mentioned above.First.the Chinese language has no tense category and it often uses time words or time phrases situated at the beginning of a clause,a sentence,a paragraph or a discourse to express temporal meaning.Nevertheless,in English there are tense markers in every predicator of finite sentences.Therefore,Chinese EFL learners are more likely to add past tense marker to the first verb of the sentence to describe the event that happened in the past.Second,in most cases,be can be translated as shi.But when be is used with adjectives in English,there is no need to use shi or any other verbs in its corresponding Chinese to express the meaning of be.And since there are no tense markers in the adjectives of English and Chinese.Chinese EFL learners are more likely to overlook the past tense marker of be.Finally,advanced Chinese EFL learners tend to be influenced by Chinese people's spatial mode of thinking.Therefore,they are likely to overlook the event time,and hence they often forget to mark the past tense.The conclusion this paper has reached is that Chinese EFL learners' misuses of past tense in their spoken English can be ascribed to language transfer and the spatiality of Chinese.