A Comparison of Instructional Techniques in the Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology

A Comparison of Instructional Techniques in the Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology

  This study presents how to teach the tense-aspect system in English, particularly the simple past tense, by focusing on lexical aspect influence and investigating the effects of two different teaching methods, implicit and explicit focus-on-form instruction. The implicit teaching method is intended to produce a synergy of input flooding and typographical enhancement. The explicit teaching method provides learners with pedagogical statements, corrective feedback, and some exemplars which are neither flooded nor visually enhanced. The subjects of the study were Korean junior college students enrolled in two basic English writing classes. One class was assigned to an implicit group and the other to an explicit group. They received instruction for 10 weeks under two different learning conditions and were tested on the target structures before and after the instruction. The results detailed the overall effectiveness of the implicit and explicit focus-on-form instructions in facilitating the target structure, the simple past, and their effects on the lexical aspectual system as well. The implicit group showed improvement in the acquisition of the simple past tense. As for the lexical aspectual system, both implicit and explicit instructions somewhat influenced the appropriate use of atelic and telic verbs. However, there were no differences of any statistical significance in the results.