The importance of grammar and tense in teaching ESL

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Teaching Grammar and ESL: Past and Present Tense

Introduction

Teaching grammar as part of ESL programs is important; Although it is a debated topic, it has been shown that “natural learners” of second languages ​​are not proficient in the language if they do not understand the basic structure provided by grammar studies. Hinkel and Fotos (2002) point out that people who pass a “critical period” of 15 years are at risk of this problem, as are people who acquire enough of the second language to be able to communicate even with grammatical deficiencies, and many people English learners do not receive the negative feedback that would let them know they are doing something wrong that they would receive in a structured situation (18).

The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the literature to demonstrate the importance of careful attention to tense.

Literature review

Plotnik analyzes the effect of time: each narrative has a base time, one that advances the action of communication. The use of tense sets the mood of the conversation or story being told; the past tense is traditionally the medium of the narrator, in which events have taken place and people have enacted their destinies. There is a finite basis for expiring time. The present tense, on the other hand, promotes a feeling or mood of immediacy and the potential for change or flexibility (Plotnik, 2003).

According to McCarthy and Carter (2002), communication involves relational aspects and the desire to express oneself in a polite and indirect manner (as opposed to frankness), often manifests itself in tense forms that are part of knowledge of grammatical construction. correct. These include verbs in a progressive context like want, like, have to, etc. The time span helps people create meaningful relational and interpersonal communication. The strategy of talking about time creates a relationship between the speaker, the event, and the listener that can involve or separate the participants of the event and each other. Understanding and correctly using the past and present tense has the potential to significantly increase not only the effective communication of verbal and written messages, but also to correctly and proactively establish relational aspects of events and situations that are an important part of proactive instruction of the grammar.

Limitations in the development of the English past tense affix -ed have been well documented in ESL learners on a variety of language tasks, including spontaneous conversations, elicited productions, sentence completion, sentence recall, production of nonsense forms, samples of writing and grammar. judgments Specifically, “the morphophonological component of English tense marking represents the patterns that children need to extract from the input to produce the various forms associated with the past tense. Specifically, children have to learn to “add -ed” to regular verb stems and recognize the various alternative phonological processes involved in indicating the past tense of irregular verbs”.

There is a semantic contrast between tenses under three headings, location in time, factuality, and backwardness. The primary use of the past tense indicates a situation in which “actions, events, processes, relations, states of affairs, or whatever a clause expresses” are either dynamic (in which case they “take place”) or static in which case they “get “. ‘… The past tense may be indicated more directly by an expression including time such as “yesterday”, a definite time at which the subject of the sentence occurred. The use of the past tense comments on something that has happened, but does not necessarily indicate that the situation continues in the present.

Huddleston (1984) pointed out that the past tense is an inherently relational concept; the inflection of the past tense indicates that the time when the situation occurred has passed in relation to another time, usually at the time the sentence is said or written. The tense of the situation in the present tense will usually be present or future, and can also be expressed in temporal terms (such as now, next week) or by a subordinate clause when such as ‘when she gets here, I’m going to talk to her’, indicating future. An important use of the subordinate clause is restricted to cases in which the future situation in which the predicted event will take place is assured: Huddleston uses the example “He is sick next week” as a meaningless misuse of the present tense in place of action. verb in “We are going to Paris next week” (145). This example shows how incorrect use of the past and present tense can not only affect communication and comprehension, but also has the potential to affect the “face” of the speaker/writer in social and work settings.

Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartik (1995) identified five main classes of alternations used in the creation of past participles in English.

The first class includes all regular verbs (eg, clean, kicked, smashed) and a large set of irregular verbs, and consists of those verbs whose past tense and past participle forms are identical (eg, brought, built, caught, had, left, kept, said, taught, thought, counted). The second class contains high-frequency irregular verbs such as hit, cut, and put that remain unchanged in their present, past, or past participle forms. For a third class of irregular verbs, the past participle is generated by adding -en to its past tense form. This class includes verbs such as beaten, broken, spoken, stolen. For the fourth class of irregular verbs, the morpheme -en is added to the present tense form (eg, blown, eaten, taken, thrown). A final class of irregular verbs use participle forms that are distinct from their present and past tense forms (eg, been, drunk, gone, written, mounted).

Redmond (2003) points out that the production of the past participle in English requires mastery of four advanced grammatical contexts: the passive, the present perfect, the past perfect, and the modal past. From syntactic and semantic perspectives, each of the uses is considered complex relative to simple active sentences because they require speakers to coordinate multiple relationships among tense, voice, aspect, and mood within the verb phrase.

Ionin and Wexler’s 2002 research among 20 children learning ESL found that they almost never produce incorrect tense/agreement morphology. In addition, the researchers noted, “L2 learners use supplementary inflection at a significantly higher rate than affix inflection, and overgenerate auxiliary forms in expressions that lack progressive participles (for example, they are helping people).

An English tense morphology/agreement grammaticality judgment task similarly shows that children learning ESL are significantly more sensitive to the ‘being paradigm’ than to the inflection of thematic verbs. These findings suggest that tense is present in students’ grammar and that it is exemplified through forms of auxiliary being. It is argued that the omission of inflection is due to problems with realizing surface morphology…it is further suggested that second language learners initially associate morphological agreement with verb elevation and therefore they acquire forms of being before in situ inflectional morphology. thematic verbs (95).

Conclusion

Correct use of tense is an important skill for ESL adults to have, and lesson plans developed to directly address this will help them communicate effectively with co-workers and people in the community about what is happening. what they want and need, what they have had. and have done and also to establish their identity based on their past history and future desires.

It is important for ESL students to learn grammar so that they can express personal thoughts in the proper syntax. The effective use of syntax is important to show different attitudes and express power and identity. Some forms of incorrect grammar can even be interpreted by the listener/reader as rude or impolite. The more accurately an individual can express his thoughts and meanings, the more effective his communication will be and the greater potential for success in his interpersonal and business communications throughout his life.

References

Hinkel E. and Photos, S. (Eds.) (2002). New perspectives on the teaching of grammar in second language classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erbaum Associates.

Huddleston, R. (1984). Introduction to English grammar. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ionin, T. & Wexler, K. (2002). Why is ‘es’ easier than ‘-s’?: Acquisition of tense/agreement morphology by children learning English as a second language. Second Language Research, 18(2): 95-136.

McCarthy, M. & Carter, R. (2002). Ten criteria for a spoken grammar. In: Hinkel E. and Photos, S. (Eds.) New perspectives on the teaching of grammar in second language classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erbaum Associates.

Plotnik, A. (2003). Time counts! Writer, 116(10): 17-18.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1995). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. New York: Longman.

Redmond, SM (2003). Children’s productions of the affix -ed in contexts of past tense and past participle. Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Resources, 46(5): 1095-109.

This article is courtesy of www.research-resource.com

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