Error Analysis of EFL Advanced Learners’Use of Pluperfect.doc

Error Analysis of EFL Advanced Learners’Use of Pluperfect 中图分类号:H319 文献标识码: A文章编号:1672-1578(2009)11-0021-05 1 Background and Literature review of Pluperfect It is well known that the Chinese language, Mandarin, is considered to be a “tenseless” language since it has no or at the least, short of formal means of expressing morphologically whether a situation obtains before, simultaneously with or after the time of utterance (Smith 1997; Comrie 1976). There is plenty of observational evidence that Chinese learners have difficulty with the acquisition of English tense and aspect. In particular, it is widely observed in Chinese language classes that these learners have a marked tendency to confuse and perplexed with the intricate use of a combination of past tenses during their lengthy journey of English language learning. What is more, even those who are luckily privileged to have reached more native-like verbal fluency and proficiency, mostly in terms of pronunciation and intonation, may still have to struggle with some particularly complicated past tense structure, among which, “Pluperfect”(Past perfect tense) may be one of the most “notorious”. In many cases, a number of Chinese students, who have received many years of EFL classroom instruction and reached an upper-intermediate or even higher level of proficiency, still tend to avoid such a tense in their spontaneous language production, or simply keep its use to the possible minimum (which is evident in my case study as well). It is also observed that when they are confronted with grammatical tasks involving obligatory contexts for the pluperfect, those learners are very likely to erroneously supply other tense forms, primarily the preterit(simple past tense) or the perfect(mainly the present perfect ). I am therefore inspired to conduct a tentative study into this intriguing and certainly very challenging phenomenon and try to make a hopefully comprehensive analysis of the errors in this regard mad