Error mapping and remedial intervention regarding English tense – Aspect structures of Turkish EFL learners

On account of cross-linguistic differences, language-specific characteristics, and mainly due to their internal complexity, English tense-aspect system remains to be one such area of language instruction, which presents great difficulty even for advanced level learners. Such a challenge to the acquisition of authentic use of target structures may be ascribed to descriptions of grammatical forms as presented in traditional reference/descriptive grammars. Reasonably often, tense-aspect forms are included in formal basis rather than meaning oriented schemas. Additionally, learners' native language may interfere with the acquisition of such structures. Though many forms included in English tense-aspect system have counterparts in other languages, there is no complete overlap among tense-aspect system across languages regarding how they are licensed regarding cross-cultural and intralingual differences. The descriptive and quasi-experimental design will be structured using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This study, primarily, scrutinized Cambridge English Corpus (henceforth CEC) to discover patterns of tense-aspect use and errors specific to Turkish EFL learners. CEC covers a body of error annotated learner corpora from various native languages. The study also focused on cognitive grammar stimulated classroom instruction in comparison to traditional grammatical teaching of English tense-aspect forms. Precisely, the procedure consisted of pre-test given one week prior to the treatment, and a post-test applied one week after the last treatment session. ANCOVA was carried out to investigate the participants' progress in learning the use of the tense-aspect structures of the target language. As a result of the study, it was observed that in the use of certain tense-aspect structures, differences in learners' level are of primary importance while similar situation is not valid for others. Additionally, regarding the remedial teaching, mean exam scores of students who received cognitive grammar stimulated instruction were significantly higher when compared to students who received traditional grammar teaching in the learning of present simple and present progressive. On the contarary, no statistically significant difference was observed between two groups considering the teaching of past simple and present perfect.