The Impact of Task Type on Advanced EFL Learners' English Verb Usage

The purpose of this study was to investigate advanced EFL learners' errors with verb usage in terms of types and frequency, and examine the impact of task type on English verb usage. The participants were 36 college students, aged 21-28 years, with varying majors. All the identified errors in the corpus were assorted into auxiliary verbs and lexical verbs and then given a comparative analysis with regard to two different tasks (i.e. letter writing and descriptive writing). The results showed that task type failed to make a strong impact on English verb usage. Concerning auxiliary verbs, the omission errors were the most common (54.7%) in letter writing, while the omission errors and the misformation errors occurred at the same frequency rate (42.4%) in descriptive writing. As for lexical verbs, the misformation errors were the most dominant both in letter writing and descriptive writing (64.4% vs. 65.8%). The confusion between transitive and intransitive verbs brought about preposition omissions in prepositional verbs. Among the subcategories of misformation errors, improper elements exhibited the highest frequency in both tasks (56.3% vs. 50.4%). Due to lack of confidence, the participants avoided using prepositional verbs and progressive and/or perfective aspects.