A form oriented study of the acquisition of tense and aspect bu Algerian adult learners' of english.

Abstract

This thesis is intended to investigate the process of acquisition of Tense and Aspect Related to the Past in the written production of adult learners of English. It is concerned with analysing this acquisitional progression in form and meaning. It attempts to draw the map of the emergence of tense and aspect morphology, then it evaluates the quality of the learners mastery of the target temporal system. Finally, it goes verifying the claims of the lexical aspect hypothesis pointing out the way Lexical aspect influences the pattern of distribution of verbal morphology throughout the evolutionary stages of the learner’s morphological development. The research was led through the analysis of the learners’ written production over two years of study and data collection. It includes three main parts. They are all involved under the incidental Form oriented studies of tense and aspect related to the past. They represent three different approaches to interlanguage analysis, so that the collection of the three of them within one same research given a more complete vision of the subject under study. The learners’ written production was analysed through a longitudinal study, a cross-sectional study and an error analysis study. The research involved the use of qualitative and quantitative statistical means. The results obtained highlight the steps of acquisition of verbal morphology. They reveal that lexical aspect influences the distribution of verbal morphology in initial and later stages of morphological develop- ment through proficiency progression. They also show that the temporal - IV - system is mastered quite adequately and when it is misused the errors are more frequently of use than of form. They are mainly due to the inherent complexity of the target language with some slight effect of the first language. On the basis of these findings, pedagogical advice and some suggestions are presented to the grammar teachers of a foreign language.