Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In the present paper I will propose a very general error analysis of the written production
of ten ESL students at the Language and Culture Program at the University of Houston,
Texas. These students have just finished their fourth level (intermediate-advanced). They
would be able to, depending on how well they are doing in class, take the TOEFL test or
even start classes at a community college or a master program. Level 4 is also a point in
which the students begin to be exposed to academic writing, which will be the main focus
of level 5 (advanced).
The data comes from six Chinese (Mandarin L1) and four Vietnamese (Vietnamese L1)
students. The texts have a length of 500 words (aprox.). The students, as it is evident
from the language displayed in their compositions, have diverse level of proficiency in
They have 22 hours of English classes, out of which approximately five (depending on
the teacher) are devoted exclusively to English Grammar. Also, there are two extra hours
in the CALL Lab which can be used to work with some extra grammar programs.
The goals of level four in terms of grammar contents are very high. Here I copy from
their syllabus what a successful student will have learned at the end of that semester:
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Of course, not all of those items are explicitly taught or even worked in class, but the
subjects whose error Ill analyze here have had classes, practice, and feedback about the
distinction between gerunds and infinitives, and about the use of verbs in every tense and
aspect form simple present to future perfect. So the use of ing as a progressive aspect
Tense and aspect are two linguistic categories that deal with the representation of time.
Usually they are defined and studied as two separate instances (Comrie 1985:6-7, 1976:
1-2): aspect involves the internal temporal structure of a situation, while tense organizes
the location of an event on the timeline taking a point of reference (usually the moment of
speech). Therefore, tense is a deictic category: it refers to a time point of period that only
is accessible by assuming a base point of reference the moment of speech. On the other
hand, aspect deals with how a verb configures its process on time. Theres no deixis
required, but the assumption that the internal design of the verb can be understood in
different ways: the most basic aspectual categories are imperfect (the event has a
continuing internal structure with not relevant initial or final stages, i.e. unbounded) and
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perfect (the event has a bounded internal structure that allows the perception of the event
as a whole). One important distinction must be made regarding aspect: it can be seen as a
verbal stem to mark a particular aspect, or as the inherent aspect that a verb stem has (for
instance, states such as to know are imperfect, while punctual events such as to drop are
perfect).
Despite the previous definition, it is clear that tense and aspect are intimately related. For
instance, many languages (such as Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, etc.) can use aspectual
markers to better delimit time frames (perfect aspect conveys, usually, the idea of
something that already took place); also, it is noticeable that the combination of tense and
aspect as in, for instance, the present/past progressive or the present perfect, play a
decisive role in the repertoire for the expression of temporality in many languages (and
theres still debates about the status of those combinations, particularly the present
perfect Cf. Michaelis 2006). Moreover, it is a well established fact that during the process
tense, while perfect aspect matches simple past forms as a natural combination (Bardovi-
Harlig 1999: 192-205). Due to the mutually complementarity between these two notions,
it would be very difficult to analyze tense and aspect errors separately. In order to have
the necessary basis for the analysis on section III, I will present briefly some ideas about
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If observed from a crosslinguistic perspective, the definition of the present tense reveals
as a problematic one. Bybee et al. (1994: 124-128) argue in favor of the notion of preset
not as a tense but an aspect: since it is located at (roughly) the same time as the speech is
produced, any possible reference point for the present as a tense is obscured. Instead, they
conceived taking into consideration the moment of speech (still a reference point, but not
in a full deictic way) reference point. Those imperfective situations tend to include:
ongoing activities, generic situations, and habitual situations. In sum, they argue that a
(1994:140).
Considering this ideas, the English simple present tense is exotic, especially regarding
how it contrasts to the present progressive tense/aspect. First, it is virtually never used to
express an immediate present (not even with states), which is always expressed with the
present progressive. Instead, it suggests a habitual meaning (as in Robert cleans the room
with a vacuum) or generic situations (Lions live in Africa). Second, the English simple
present cant express an expected or planned future event (as in * Next month I travel to
Peru), but it is the present progressive the form that conveys that meaning (Next month
Im traveling to Peru). The reasons for those particular uses are beyond the scope of this
paper. However, it is evident that, if the present has a natural tendency to express
imperfect situations, then it must be true that those verbs with inherent imperfect meaning
(states) are natural candidates to be commonly used with present markers. Therefore, the
use of present tense with actions (with inherent perfect aspect) can be seen as a potential
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problem for any learner of ESL (in fact, I use the simple present to express future quite
Michaelis (2004: 3) explains the existence of the generic and habitual meaning as a result
of coertion. This means that certain conceptual combinations (a present suffix in a non
stative verb) can produce new meanings (such as the habitual and generic) because we
are coercing our conceptualization system to make some sense out of the combination.
The only way to conceive an action as occurring in the present is by iterating it until is
concept is created). This kind of knowledge supposes a high degree of control of the
meaning of both lexical items and tense/aspect morphology. If a ESL student is going to
learn the use of the present tense in contrast with the (conceptually very similar) present
progressive, he/she will need to master inherent lexical meaning, restrictions in the use of
the present that are exotic compared to what most of the languages on the world do,
and to re-structure their own conceptions about the time frame that counts as the
moment of speech (Cf. Levinson 1983: 73-79 for a brief discussion on how the location
It is widely accepted between researchers of L2 acquisition that tense and aspect interact
from their first appeareance in the verbal system of L2 learners. The process of
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During the acquisition of tense/aspect forms in English, the first formal categories to
appear are the progressive suffix ing (initially without an auxiliary or with a non
conjugated auxiliary) and highly frequent irregular past forms (such as gone, was and
had). Regular Past (-ed suffix) appears later, followed by the present tense marker s,
periphrastic perfect forms (Have/Be + verb) and periphrastic future (Be + going + to +
Verb) constructions. In sum, the progressive is the most salient form for learners of ESL,
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numerous hypothesis that reflect the stance a researcher has on how L2 is acquired (i.e.
present the Aspect Hypothesis, since it has a functional basis and its widely considered
This means that beginners use of verbal morphology is in function of marking the
inherent (lexical) aspect distinctions of the verbs, instead of using it to mark tense (this
has been called the primacy of aspect over tense during the first stages of L2
acquisition). It has also been claimed (Bardovi-Harlig 2000: 277-279) that, alongside the
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process: learners have the tendency of using past marking on the foreground events and
subjects grammar class was the distinction between the use of the gerund (a
nominalization achieved through the progressive suffix) and the infinitive (the
combination of to and the bare form of a verb). It is well known that the use of those
forms is amongst the hardest concepts to teach to second language learners (Duffley
2003: 324). In fact, it is not relevant for my paper to even try to come up with a proposal
to clarify this distinction. Most of the times, the way that issue is taught in the classroom
involves long list of verbs that either use gerunds as subjects, infinitives or both. So the
In Duffleys view (2003: 349) neither the distinction between particular versus general
nor that between reification versus hypothesis/potentiality, nor any of the derivative
validated versus validatable, are able to explain the full range of meanings expressed
respectively by gerunds or infinitives when used as the subject of the sentence. Instead,
he proposes a very abstract solution: the meaning of the -ing form evokes the event as a
totality of interiority (i.e., as an abstract entity very similar to the representation provided
by a deverbal noun). This means that the internal imperfect structure conveyed by the
progressive focuses on the developing of just the internal stages that are, lets put it this
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way, the middle part of the event. This explains why -ing forms are neutral regarding the
distinction between realized and nonrealized events, while, in the case of infinitives, the
the bare verbal form, which accounts for the preponderance of nonrealized events with
the infinitive.
This kind of semantic distinctions are extremely complicated to convey. A concrete proof
of this is that Duffley went over numerous explanations from well known cognitive-
functional authors (Givn, Wierzbicka, Langacker, Van Valin, etc.) just to show how the
examples they were using to back their hypothesis could be turned against each others
views, leaving the problem pretty much at a stand still. If this is a problem of this level
for a linguist, then It is clear that language teachers and students alike have used the
In a very interesting poster, Vercellotti and De Jong (2009) analyzed the errors different
distinction in the complement clause. They came to the conclusion that a statistically
significant number of errors were present when the students were faced with forms that
can take either gerund or infinitive. It seems then that the variability of input impedes
acquisition. One of the most common errors was the use of the bare form of the verb as
a complement (* I like walk). This kind of situation will be present in the data of the
students of UH. It is clear that the use of the ing form in contexts that are typical for
nouns produces overgeneralization. The students and according to their teacher (p.c.)
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not only Vietnamese of Chinese students, but almost everyone in classtend to gerunds
instead of intended deverbal nouns (action for acting, protection for protecting, etc.).
3.1. Mandarin
The following table (from Duff and Li 2002: 419) illustrates the imperfective aspect in
Mandarin.
The foregrounded progressive form can also be found as zheng zai as the following
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I am wearing clothes. (from)
This kind of distinction between backgrounded and foregrounded (that overlaps with the
lexical imperfective and perfective aspect, as seen in the translations offered for the last
examples) becomes an important issue for ESL learners: if they perceive an action to be
progressive, they would rely on the use of a specific time frame that foregrounds that
event as an ongoing one, but the basic form of the verb remains. For more state-like
order. So, this could mean that for progressive forms, Chinese students may rely more on
3.2. Vietnamese
The following table (from Tran and Den 2003: 4) illustrates the basics of the Vietnamese
aspect system.
Meanings
In Vietnamese the position of the morpheme is very important: it has to precede the verb
(exception to this rule is ri). However, these tense markers are not required for a
ambiguity, , ang, s may be used to clarify the context (Tang 2007: 17). In
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Vietnamese, sentences containing only the verb and no other marker are allowed to
While doing research about tense and aspect in Vietnamese, one source (Duffield: 2009)
proposed that the progressive could be expressed by ang, and also by another form not
between the differences of those two progressive forms, nor the examples are of any help
for that. So I can only speculate that, maybe tat distinction is between a continuous form
and a progressive one. Maybe the distinction has been all but lost in colloquial speech
and that is why other sourced dont even mention ng. However, if its an active part
of the Vietnamese aspect system, that wont produce complications for the student, since
As it was said in section 1, the data I am analyzing comes from the academic writing
classes. Therefore, the characteristics of the language used are necessarily different from
the oral one. To begin with, the pragmatic resources are severely limited in academic
writing: the student needs to create a very fixed context based on the information he/she
has gotten beforehand. That information should be presented in the clearest possible way,
so repetition and explicitness are valued. Also, the assumption of the ideal audience (in
most of the cases, the teacher that evaluates the composition) guides the contents they
present. In addition, in this kind of text, narrations are kept to the minimal, and
elaboration of reasons (through appropriate use of transition words) is one of the main
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goals. Therefore, formal texts such as these are prone to present non sequential reference
to events (i.e. reverse order), as in focusing on the consequences to then explain the
reasons, etc. This kind of display of information requires a solid use of the tense/aspect
One of the main objectives of this composition was to practice conditional clauses
(mainly hypothetical ones, which use past and pluperfect forms). Also, the students were
instructed to use many formal idioms that help organize the flow of information, such as
the above mentioned, last but not least, etc. Here is a list of the most common errors
found:
a. Use of present progressive instead of simple present, especially with the verb
become for Mandarin speakers. This is due to the strict telic nature of the verb in
Mandarin. It is impossible to appear with a progressive marker (Haowen Jiang, p.c.).
c. Vietnamese and Mandarin L1 speakers at this level dont know how to use
passive forms that involve the verb be as a non-conjugated form, for instance inside
of an auxiliary verb phrase (measures have to be taken, besides being put in jail).
Students use simple gerund of just the bare form of the verb. This forms complex
forms are not the object of any particular instruction and they have to be, at one point,
deduced by the students after more exposure to data (and very likely formal data,
since those passives are not usual, I believe, in colloquial speech)
d. The gerund is assumed to be interchangeable with nouns that refer to actions. For
instance, acting instead of actions
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Errors (part that is problematic because of the use of present tense, or an ing form )
and comments are written in italics. If the sentence is correct, its written in bold and
italics.
A. Student 1
1. These criminal become more common no.
Use of the present tense instead of the progressive form.
2. good penalties for these kinds of crime is putting the criminal in jail, fining
them for their crime, or forcing them to do some community services depending
on the level of the crime.
With no temporal frame the actions are named with gerunds. This is in agreement with
Duffley (2003) explanation about the distinction between gerunds and infinitives.
3. Because it can help preventing the other people have idea to steal an art or sale
animals illegally.
Help is one of those few constructions that use the base verbal form (some people call
this a subjunctive form). Here the student has used the ing form as a nominal
complement. Immediately, the construction prevent someone from doing something is not
used correctly: the verb of influence prevent uses a bare verbal complement. Maybe it is
just because of the lack of knowledge of that construction, but it can also be that the
learner doesnt want to use infinitive complements. The infinitive to steal should be
considered more of a preposition mistake.
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4. Besides putting in jail, another common punishment is that the criminal should be
fined.
Theres a lack of use of the participle (perfective aspect) in combination with the
progressive in a passive form. The main problem is that these forms of passives are not
understood by the students.
B. Student 2
1. I have a proposal to solve this kind of crime. It is put the thieves to the jail and
pays money as well
The student uses the bare verb as a noun. The right form could be infinitive or gerund, so
this follows Vercellotti and De Jongs (2009) generalization about the bare output of a
phrase that admits either infinitive or gerund.
2. Many people in the world will feel sorry with famous art's missing.
Use of the gerund as a possessed noun. However, it could be just a contraction problem.
(the teacher of these students thinks so.).
3. The punishment for the art theft should be put thieves in jail.
In this case it could be either to put or putting, so it is likely that the possibility of both
prevents the student from making a more accurate decision. The infinitive would be a
better option because of the implicit previous event (having committed a crime).
C. Student 3
1. so police should blockade the border to prevent trafficking.
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D. Student 4
1. the illegal sale of animals is happen every day.
Problem with the use of the progressive and the present tense (at least the use of the bare
form can be related to an underlying preference for that tense due to L1 interference).
3. governments should add the protecting animals to the education at their country
Same situation as above.
4.2. Mandarin
A. Student 1
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mind: art steling (the stealing of art). In this case, the form stole is not the base
form but the only participle (past or present) available. This might be due to the fact that
the word steal was introduced to the students in a reading about stolen art and they
had to elaborate about the issue on their compositions. So the form Stolen might have
been taken as either a gerund for the base form of the verb.
2. some dramatic measures have to take to prevent more perish masterpiece from
stealing.
Problems with passive voice: past participles in combination with a non finite be are
complicated.
4. Infrared ray will make the alarm working when someone illegal enter the
museum.
The construction make someone/something do something is still not clear. Maybe
another instance of the learners rule: verbal complements are gerunds if the verb is
not like, want, etc.
5. Analyzing most of art stolen cases, it is not difficult to find that sometimes thieves
can steal art very easy. Although its an absolute construction that needs a subject that
is logical for the gerund)
Here it is clear that the verb modifier (the so called adverbial use of the gerund) is not
a problem for this speaker. Mandarin uses the progressive marker to create a very
similar construction (Jiang p.c.)
6. If there is no illegal art market existing, thieves do not want to steal any art
This from, very unusual in English and very likely a mistake is due to Mandarin
interference. Jiang (p.c.) says that existential sentences such as the one before are
formed in a way that replicates what this student used.
B. Student 2
1. Another punishment that could be used for people who commit this crime is
forcing them to pay an expensive fine.
This student shows a good command of the gerund and of the infinitive in the same
sentence. The construction with to force is correct, while the gerund is, in my view,
used correctly given that shes speaking about a possible punishment (not one that has to
be applied). This student solves well potentially conflicting constructions.
2. human beings and animals can begin living peacefully together again.
Here she takes risks with a complex construction: modal + progressive construction.
Looking on Google, can begin living had 7,230 results, while can begin to live had
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54,400. This is an interesting case that means, she is either really advanced or she is
overgeneralizing.
C. Student 3
4. It [a punishment] should also give serious concerns to those who may be thinking
about stolen animals.
More evidence that stolen has been learned as a (mistaken) base form.
D. Student 4
E. Student 5
2. In the other hand, the people who stolen the animals maybe haven't work
It seems that the problem is the lack of auxiliary before stolen, but we can see that that
is not an issue later on the same sentence (havent work). Given the other students data,
it seems that stolen has not been understood by the students: here is a past form.
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F. Student 6
1. They will [r]eclaim their surviving right and curse human being murder
Here it should have been right to survive: it seems that the student is overgeneralizing
the adjectival use of the gerund. Given the fact that this element can be used as a noun,
adjective, and adverb (or even as the verb, if we consider its role as an auxiliary), it is no
surprise that the students tend to use it too much.
2. we have to become vegetarianism, and hoping that vegetables are never able to
talk in the future.
It is possible that for this student both the gerund and the infinitive are interchangeable,
which is another case of overgeneralization of the form that has been recently introduced
or redefined (the gerund).
4. If animals are able to talk, we are shocking that our lifestyle has to change so
much
Possible overgeneralization from the combination pronoun + be + gerund. It is so
strong that even the past participle is left aside.
One thing that is clear to me after analyzing those texts is that students can show different
However, it is clear, and no wonder at all, that the influence of L1 is very powerful and it
is present even in advanced students. Sometimes, it seems that the students are
deliberately using their L1 to produce forms that fall beyond what they have been taught
(for instance, existential constructions or the use of perfect passive forms with being).
This would be considered the result of the need of expressing something in more precise
terms (the objective of formal writing) and not being able to produce it with ease.
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I think that advanced students can be divided in two groups: one composed by learners
that take grammatical risks in order to achieve new expressions, and the other composed
by students that shape their productions to what they have been explicitly taught as much
as possible. In my own experience, the students that tend to take more risks are those that
have run out of basic grammatical resources and find themselves in the necessity of
conveying new ideas. Those that are not taking new risks are those students that keep
at an advanced level will necessarily expose their flaws. The topics that are proposed at
any advanced level class are complex because the teacher needs to engage the student in
a lively discussion, it is also an opportunity to ask the student to do some extra reading as
a research, and it encourages the student to get used to the academic life he or she might
be starting at an American University (thats one of the main objectives of the advanced
Therefore, errors tell us how committed a student has been to the expression of new ideas
Furthermore, the case of the use of the progressive aspect in English has been particularly
Huang propose (2004: 60-62) theres not a clear cut between acquisition stages. In this
particular case, the production of formal writing wont show, because of its stylistic
restrictions, lexical items and pragmatic strategies as a mean to remember to use the
tense/aspect markers. Those are more easily found in oral forms. However, it can still be
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argued that the students have used the rules they are familiar with as carefully as possible
(which is in its own form a way to make one sure that the right forms are used). This can
be seen in the overgeneralization of the gerund over deverbal nouns. The students know
that a deverbal is possible in the positions viewed in the previous section. However, they
decide to use the gerund form since, I suppose, the degree of abstractness it demands can
Another issue Yang and Huang cover is that, when faced with new tense/aspect
reinforce the newly learned construction (2004: 51). In the texts I analyzed the students
didnt seem to use any unusual amount of lexical temporal expressions, maybe since their
level is already advanced and the composition was the last one they wrote in that
semester.
To conclude this discussion, I will present a summary of the list of elements of formal
instruction that can affect the acquisition of English tense/aspect marking (form Yang and
Huang 2004: 59-67). I think their ideas summarize very well the most important aspects
a. The role of language exposure plays a crucial role: while the subjects on Yang
and Huang study are circumscribed to formal instruction settings, the students I
analyzed had a full immersion setting. However, the nature of the task they are doing
(formal writing) still can be considered a non-immersion form, because they do not
have to go around using formal writing skills continuously. Im sure that these
students would perform better at an oral task. The pressure of formal writing might be
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preventing them from using more colloquial resources that cue their use of
tense/aspect forms.
b. It took Mandarin L1 students a span of 6 years to finally being able to control the
past tense marker in English L2. This is due to the interference from L1 which only
uses contextual cues and other lexical temporal markers. It is clear form the data
analyzed that most of the UH students are still not in full command of the several uses
of the English progressive aspect (as the case of become not being used in the
progressive form shows).
c. The dependence that grammar textbooks create between lexical markers (adverbs
or relative pronouns, to mention just two) produces that students increase their use of
those lexical elements in addition to the tense morphology in order to have a
mnemonic aid when using some verbal morphology. In the case of the errors
analyzed in this paper, it was not clear that the students undergeneralized the
instances of -ing (i.e. use them in conjunction with very specific lexical cues). As it
was shown, they most of time overgeneralized their use due to the needs of
expression of a formal subject and the kind of composition they were expected to
produce.
In sum, theres a great potential in the practice of formal writing and the development of
more complex grammatical resources at advanced levels. Even if it is true that contents
such as the difference between gerund an infinitives and the use of passive voices that
include an ing form suppose a very sophisticated level of grammatical awareness, the
necessity of expression and the lack of pragmatic and lexical cues will face the learner
with numerous challenges and new possible uses for what they have been taught. Thereby
an advanced level teacher needs to be prepared to monitor the special grammatical needs
of his/her students, as well as to plan the interaction between readings, composition
topics and grammatical contents to emphasize the required input and to maximize the
practice.
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References
Bybee, Joan & Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar
Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Duff, Patricia & Duanduan Li. 2002. The acquisition and use of perfective aspect in
Mandarin. In Salaberry, Rafael & Yasuhiro Shirai (Eds.) The L2 Acquisition of Tense
Aspect Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 417-454.
Duffley, Patrick. 2003. The Gerund and the to-Infinitive as Subject. Journal of English
Linguistics. 31; 324-352.
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Hinkel, Eli. 1992. L2 Tense and Time Reference. TESOL Quarterly. 26,3; 557-572.
Tran, Jennie & Kamil Ud Deen (2003). Aspect Marking and Modality in Child
Vietnamese. Paper in the BUCLD 28 Conference Proceedings Supplement. Available at
http://psy-static01.bu.edu/posters/tran.pdf
Vercellotti, Mary and Nell de Jong. 2009 I Prefer Not Go English L2 Verb
Complement Errors. Presented at GURT 2009. Pages N/A. Available at
http://www.learnlab.org/uploads/mypslc/talks/english_l2_verb_complements.ppt
Yang, Suying and Yue Yuan Huang. 2004. The impact of the absence of Grammatical
Tense in L1on the Acquisition of the Tense-Aspect System in L2. IRAL 42, 49-70.
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