Errors in tense and aspect in compositions of secondary school students in Singapore

This paper investigates errors in past tense marking in compositions of Singapore secondary school students. This study examines, firstly, what are the patterns of errors in tense and aspect in the compositions of secondary school students and secondly, what are the possible explanations to these errors in tense and aspect. Findings from this study reveal that lexical semantic of verbs can account for tense marking errors. Introduction This study is an investigation of tense and aspect errors in compositions of Singapore secondary students from the lexical semantic perspective. In particular, it seeks to provide a systematic understanding of the differences in the marking of past tense in Singapore English writing through a quantitative investigation that examines data from the perspective of the Aspect Hypothesis in the language acquisition literature. A central claim of the Aspect Hypothesis salient to this study is that the selection and use of perfective and/or past marking is initially restricted to the marking of telic predicates (Salaberry and Shirai 2002, Andersen and Shirai, 1996 Bardovi-Harlig 2000) in other words, a learner will acquire and appropriately use morphological tense markings for telic verbs (i.e. achievements and accomplishments) before atelic verbs (i.e. states and activities). The Aspect Hypothesis therefore suggests that the distribution of tense errors can be predicted on the basis of telicity – where we would expect a higher occurrence of tense errors with verbs whose lexical aspects are atelic, i.e. states and activities, than verbs whose lexical aspects are telic, i.e. achievements and accomplishments. In this study, we formulate and test the hypothesis that the aspectual classes of verbs can explain patterns of errors in past tense marking. Data Collection Lenneberg (1967) proposes that there is a critical period for language learning, he reasoned that lateralization for language takes place by puberty and the brain’s left hemisphere is no longer able to acquire language. Therefore, secondary three students are chosen as subjects for this study. Furthermore, these students would have completed eight out of ten years of compulsory education in Singapore and these students would have covered most of the English Language curriculum by age 14. The data for this research consists of the middle of year examination composition scripts from a secondary school. Middle of the year examination composition scripts are used in this study to ensure that the output from the subjects are not influenced by teachers or peers. Data was collected from a neighbourhood school whose students are in the average ability range with an average Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) score of about 225 for the Express stream and 190 for the Normal stream. A neighbourhood school was chosen for this study, as this would be more representative of the general student population in Singapore. A total of 205 scripts were collected. The average length of each composition is about 430 words and each composition contains about 75 verbs and verb phrases. From these 205 scripts, 55 scripts that exhibit morphological errors in past tense marking are selected and transcribed. On average, scripts that exhibit past tense marking errors have more than 20% of the verbs (and verb phrases) with past tense marking errors. The total size of corpus is about 24,000 words. As this study is examining the reasons for errors in past tense marking and not the percentage of errors amongst students’ writing, the data for this study is made up of the 55 scripts, which exhibit past tense marking errors. In this study, we do not distinguish students from the Normal (Academic) and the Express Stream. This is because the syllabuses for both streams of students are identical and that both groups of students are expected to show mastery in the same grammatical features in their writings at Secondary Two. The only difference between students from the two streams is that students from the express stream are This conference proceedings may be used for private study or research purpose only.