The Adverbial Temporal System of Elementary School English Learners

The Adverbial Temporal System of Elementary School English Learners

This study investigates how Korean elementary school learners express temporality in English, diagnoses some difficulties, if any, in learning the temporal system, and provides some teaching guidance to expedite and facilitate the learning process. An experiment was conducted on 144 elementary school students in order to determine the interlanguage temporal system of the learners, employing two experimental tasks: a production task and a translation task. Analyses of the results showed that they had an adverbial temporal system where they counted on adverbials in interpreting the temporal location of given utterances regardless of verbal inflections. The research emphasizes the relevance of explicit teaching to the classroom instruction to foster the learning process.