A Study Of Tense Errors In The Oral English Task Of Junior High School Students

The English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education(Ministry of Education 2011)points out that English teaching in junior high school should focus on cultivating students' ability to use English appropriately in interpersonal communication,based on the actual communication needs and cognitive development level of junior high school students,and at the same time lay a foundation for improving their international communication ability.In addition,many middle school students frequently make tense errors even rising to the university stage to study(Han Cunxin&Fan Bin 2007).Therefore,in order to understand the tense problems existing in the spoken English of middle school students better and help them to lay a solid foundation,this study explores and analyzes the tense errors in 40 middle school students' oral English in Qingdao,being based on the theory of error analysis.This study is in order to answer the following three research questions: Firstly,what are the types of tense errors and the rate of errors in junior high school students' oral English?Second,what is the situation of the tense errors of junior high school students reflected in different oral tasks? Third,what are the factors that lead to the tense errors among junior high school students' oral English?This study analyzes the collected spoken corpus from test,together with the data collected from questionnaire and interview.The major findings are as follow:(1)The common types of tense errors in middle school students' spoken English are tense choice errors,subject-verb agreement errors,tense agreement errors and tense form errors.Among them,tense choice errors are the most.They are the biggest challenges in using tense in spoken English for middle school students.The errors of tense selection mainly focus on Simple Past and Simple Present.Unlike previous studies,the number of errors in Present Prefect is also high.(2)The tense errors of junior high school students reflected in different types of oral tasks are different.In the two speaking tasks of telling a story based on pictures and telling a story on a topic,the types of tense errors shows consistency.Tense choice errors are the most and tense form errors are the least in both of the tasks.However,in terms of quantity,the number of tense choice errors in the task of telling a story on a topic is significantly higher than that in the task of telling a story based on pictures.In addition,subject-verb agreement errors,tense agreement errors and tense form errors appear more frequently in the task of telling a story on a topic than in the task of telling astory based on pictures.In general,students make more oral tense errors in the task of telling a story on a topic than in the task of telling a story based on pictures.It shows that the tasks of telling a story on a topic are more difficult for middle school students than the tasks of telling a story based on pictures.(3)There are three main factors that lead to the occurrence of tense errors in middle school students' spoken English:interlingual transfer,intralingual transfer,and the learner's factor.The learner's factor includes learning interest and motivation,learning methods and strategies,and test anxiety.Among them,interlingual transfer and intralingual transfer are the most important factors.According to the results of this study,the author puts forward the following suggestions for oral teaching in junior high school:(1)Use comparison and contrast to teach Simple Present and Simple past;(2)Create a situational method to improve the teaching of the present perfect tense;(3)Set up oral tasks with different complexity;(4)Practice oral English more and overcome test anxiety.This study can provide some useful enlightenment for the tense teaching in oral English of junior high school students and help students to improve their communicative competence in oral English.