How Tense and Aspect are Sequenced by EFL Learners

Abstract

The objective of the present research is to check how Iranian EFL learners use tense and aspect morphology with different verb classes. The participants of the study were 128 EFL learners from five grades of Iranian junior high school and senior high school. Iranian high school students start learning English from the first grade. A test of 40 items was developed for each grade aimed to tap their knowledge of English tenses presented in their school textbooks. 40 verbs were chosen being from state, activity, achievement, and accomplishment types. The corpus data (5120 tokens) showed, in L2 learners’ test performance, there was indeed a strong correlation between the use of tense-aspect markings and lexical aspect, thus confirming the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis. But, regarding the sequence of the verb tenses, the findings were not in line with the sequence of the verb tenses emerged in the learners’ performance with the simple present tense, especially at early grades.