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Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents

  • Haiquan Huang , Lina Qian EMAIL logo and Yixiong Chen
Published/Copyright: February 19, 2024
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
From the journal International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching Volume 63 Issue 3

Abstract

Distinct from English, Mandarin verbs are not inflected to encode Past Tense, but perfective aspect is typically marked by aspectual markers -le and -guo. Moreover, resultative verb compounds are often viewed as accomplishment verbs, denoting telicity of an event. This study attempts to examine whether such linguistic properties transfer to the acquisition of English. We tested 22 English learning Chinese adolescents in two experiments, respectively using a Story Restatements Task and an Elicited Production Task. Overall, the experiments generated three major findings. First, the participants marked irregular verbs 13 % higher than regular ones. Second, the participants used bare verbs to express English Past Tense 12 % of the situations. Third, the participants adopted Mandarin-like RVCs to denote English Past Tense 10 % of the cases. Taken together, the findings indicate that besides morphophonological transfer, English learning Chinese adolescents adopt Mandarin word-formation rules to encode English Past Tense, which is new evidence of cross-linguistic transfer. We discuss the implications of our findings.

Keywords: second language acquisition; past tense; perfective aspect; cross-linguistic transfer
Corresponding author: Lina Qian, 74777 Jianghan University , Wuhan, Hubei, 430056, China, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

For helpful discussion, we wish to thank Jennifer Bowes and Peng Zhou. We are also thankful to the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which help us to improve the quality of this paper. Finally, we are obliged to the students from Nanhu Junior Middle School, Wuhan, China, who participated in the present study. Without their help, we would not have completed this research.

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Received: 2023-08-15
Accepted: 2024-01-21
Published Online: 2024-02-19
Published in Print: 2025-09-25

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
  4. Research Articles
  5. Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
  6. Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
  7. Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
  8. Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
  9. Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
  10. Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
  11. Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
  12. “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
  13. Regular Articles
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  15. A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
  16. Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
  17. Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
  18. Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
  19. General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
  20. Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
  21. Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
  22. Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
  23. The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
  24. An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
  25. “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
  26. Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
  27. Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
  28. A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
  29. Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
  30. The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)
https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2023-0191
Keywords for this article
second language acquisition; past tense; perfective aspect; cross-linguistic transfer

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
  4. Research Articles
  5. Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
  6. Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
  7. Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
  8. Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
  9. Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
  10. Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
  11. Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
  12. “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
  13. Regular Articles
  14. Defining competencies for training non-native Korean speaking teachers: a Q methodology approach
  15. A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
  16. Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
  17. Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
  18. Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
  19. General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
  20. Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
  21. Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
  22. Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
  23. The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
  24. An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
  25. “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
  26. Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
  27. Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
  28. A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
  29. Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
  30. The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)
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