Error Analysis of EFL Advanced Learners’Use of Pluperfect

中图分类号:H319 文献标识码: A文章编号:1672-1578(2009)11-0021-05

1 Background and Literature review of Pluperfect

It is well known that the Chinese language, Mandarin, is considered to be a “tenseless” language since it has no or at the least, short of formal means of expressing morphologically whether a situation obtains before, simultaneously with or after the time of utterance (Smith 1997; Comrie 1976). There is plenty of observational evidence that Chinese learners have difficulty with the acquisition of English tense and aspect. In particular, it is widely observed in Chinese language classes that these learners have a marked tendency to confuse and perplexed with the intricate use of a combination of past tenses during their lengthy journey of English language learning. What is more, even those who are luckily privileged to have reached more native-like verbal fluency and proficiency, mostly in terms of pronunciation and intonation, may still have to struggle with some particularly complicated past tense structure, among which, “Pluperfect”(Past perfect tense) may be one of the most “notorious”.

In many cases, a number of Chinese students, who have received many years of EFL classroom instruction and reached an upper-intermediate or even higher level of proficiency, still tend to avoid such a tense in their spontaneous language production, or simply keep its use to the possible minimum (which is evident in my case study as well). It is also observed that when they are confronted with grammatical tasks involving obligatory contexts for the pluperfect, those learners are very likely to erroneously supply other tense forms, primarily the preterit(simple past tense) or the perfect(mainly the present perfect ).

I am therefore inspired to conduct a tentative study into this intriguing and certainly very challenging phenomenon and try to make a hopefully comprehensive analysis of the errors in this regard made by a particular Chinese learner, who used to receive at least 7 years’ formal language instruction in china and continued to learn English on and off after she immigrated into Australia at the age of 16(who is now 25). However, it should be noted that this thesis aims not to have a thorough and all-embracing research into “pluperfect” itself, but rather, is an attempt and effort, by applying some Second Language Acquisition theories, to account for the sources of the errors emerged in the inappropriate use of pluperfect and its pedagogical significance.

The structure of Past Pefrect is formed this way: subject + had + past participle. (Declerck: 354) Though the conjugation seems fairly simple, subject being the only variable, and there is little difficulty in subject-verb agreement, however, the actual use of Pluperfect is far more complicated than its superficial structure looks when the complicity in its syntactic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic implications and its relationship with other tense and aspects are taken into consideration.

As the literature of study on Pluperfect, usually called “past-in-the-past”, has shown, the perfect construction indicates relational anteriority and relevance to a deictic zero point (Comrie,1976:53). The English past perfect construction is generally used to refer to an event that occurred before a particular point in the past.

In Reichenbach’s study of various factors concerning tense and aspects in English language (1947:289290), he put forwards that three points in time should be taken into consideration even in the description of those tenses which, “in superficial consideration, seem to concern only two time points”. The three time points considered by Reichenbach are:S the point of speech, E the point of event, R the point of reference.

figure 1. Tense and aspect time relations in English.

As illustrated in Reichenbach’s visual representation, the pluperfect, preterit, and present perfect are contrasted in terms of the time points R (reference point), E (event point), and S (speech point). The distinguishing feature of the past perfect is that the R point is distinct from both the E point and the S point. This R point may be signaled to varying degrees of explicitness in the clause or the immediate context, which is a crucial issue in the interpretation of the past perfect.

However, as tense(but not aspect), is absent in the mind of Chinese learners of English, there is no such a vivid diagram mapping out the intricate relationship between different past tenses when they start to learn the language in the first place. In Chinese language, it is generally agreed that there are no grammatical markers or inflectional morphemes that signal where on the time line the reference time of the utterance is positioned relative to the speech time.

Secondly, McCawley summarized (1981: 348) that

grammatically, “the pluperfect has two basic uses: one in which it is, as it were, the past of the preterit and one in which it is the past of the present prefect”. This means that the temporal structure of either the past or the present perfect will also be part of the structure of the past perfect. As a matter of fact, the only difference between the past perfect and the former two tenses is that the part played by “Time Orientation”.As we can see,such a “duality” and “overlapping” part in pluperfect’s syntactic representation and semantic interpretation may well intensify its complexity, give rise to the likely confusion and mismatching, and probably lead to the errors of overgeneralization.

Third, according to Bardovi-Harlig’s research, the order of emergence of past tense follow the pattern of pastpast progressivepresent perfectpluperfect. Such findings echo with Klein’s suggestions of the emergence order from “V-ed”,”V-ing”, to “have V-ed”, “had-V-ed” (1993,1995). Such an order, in which Pluperfect generally comes at the last stage of verbal and aspectual acquisition was further proved by the studies conducted by Dietrich(1995) and Schlyter (1990), which concluded that the language-specific pluperfect equivalent appears quite late in other languages as well.

The order of emergence presents us a clearer picture of the process of when and in what sequences such past tenses may be acquired by the learners. It also implies that the emergence of the pluperfect is based on the sound development of the first three tenses. Therefore, the conceptualization of the pluperfect can not be constructed independently by itself, instead, as called by Comrie (1985:65) , it is” an absolute-relative tense as its meaning combines two kinds of time reference, absolute time location of the reference point with relative time location of the situation”.

Such an order of emergence provides us with very inspirational insights to into the development of learners’ language, the interlanguage, a term coined by Selinker(1969), meaning “an emerging linguistic system, independent of learners L1 and the target language, that has been developed by a learner, who has not become fully proficient yet but is only approximating the target language”. It is widely acknowledged that during the process of target language acquisition, learners may well preserve some features of their first language in speaking or writing and create a transitional system of language that reflects the development of their own language competence at a certain point. It is characterized as a systematic, rule-governed and dynamic language in flux, whose variabilities may cause it to go back and forth(i.e.,backsliding) or “freeze” at a certain point(i.e. fossilization) , and can be visudalized as a continuum from zero L2 competence to native-like l2 competence, shows as below.

Figure 2:No competence--Native like competence.

The three most prominent regularities of Pluperfect summarized above highlights its complex nature and may soundly explain and predict the possible difficulties for the Chinese learners to make appropriate use of it. Further elaboration on how such complexity would affect learners’ acquisition of this structure would be made in the following case study.

2 Methods

As briefly mentioned above, the participant of this study is actually my cousin, whose first language is Chinese and age is 25 now. She had been studying in Shanghai, China for more than 9 years(where English becomes a compulsory subject in the curriculum from grade 3 of primary school) and was considered to be a girl quite creative in arts and crafts, but no very academically successful. She immigrated into Australia at the age of 16 and thereafter lives with her divorced mother, who has been managing a small convenience store, located in Ashfield, Sydney(where features a considerably large proportion of Asian population, especially Chinese from Shanghai). My cousin had attended some language schools during her first year in Sydney, and later scored 6.5 in IELTS, (7 for speaking and listening, but 6 in reading and writing). She was later admitted by an average university but dropped out in the second year, claiming that she was not interested in what she was required to learn. In the following years, she received some schoolings at different levels while helping her mother with the business at the same time. And now she is being trained at TAFE, with the hope to become a prospective kindergarten and primary school teacher.

In order to test my hypothesis that Pluperfect could be a rather complex tense, in which even the advanced learners would make errors(rather than mistakes) and may fail to use it appropriately in a obligatory context, I designed a list of questions on the 3 daily-life topics, respectively “gifts”, “travel” and “graduation” with the intention to elicit the participant’s use of a variety of past tenses, especially that of pluperfect in some obligatory contexts.

The pattern of questions goes as follows: take the topic on “gifts” as an example: Are you the person who likes getting gifts? 2) What is the most memorable gift you have ever received? 3) Did you receive any gift on your birthday last year(if not the year before last year)? 4) What was it ? 5) And before you received the gifts, what kind of gifts had you expected to get from your friends or parents?And why?6) Besides, before that birthday, had you ever made any plan for how to celebrate it? (Write down your answers to each question in about 250 words, Sept. 5th)

I collected the data(the written answers to these questions) and number the errors, especially in the context where pluperfect must be applied(as in Q5 and 6), on a weekly basis, on 3 occasions, hoping to see if the errors were made consistently and at the same time, on each occasion, I categorized all the tense errors into 3 groups: errors made in simple past tense, in present perfect, in pluperfect(past perfect) in order to carry out a quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of errors.

What is worthy to be noted is that the relatively long list of questions may seem more like a questionnaire to the participant and the topics designed about the present and past experiences are familiar to her as well. In this way, natural and spontaneous production was expected and encouraged, and real purpose to elicit errors was tactically covered.

In addition, a combination of contrastive analysis and error analyses is adopted based on the insights that ( Towell: 1996) “the weak form of contrastive analysis is just one aspect of the larger area of error analysis, which is not inconsistent with EA, instead, shares the same departure from the target language”. It is true that the contrastive approach of analysis helps to account for the interference from the students’ native languages, and may well complement the limitation of EA in the case of the occurrence of learner’s avoidance or ignorance to a particular structure.

3 Results

The results I got from the case study are quite insightful and to some extent, offer sound proof to my hypothesis. From figure 4, we can find that the participant performed quite steadily and comfortably with the use of simple past, except some occasional lapses in the spelling of irregular verb form such as “sleeped” (slept), and some careless mistakes when contraction is used, such as “I’m(I was). It is noteworthy that sometimes the learners are quite aware of the mistakes they may have made and may well correct them by themselves as shown in “I give/ gave” in the first list of questions.

In the category of present perfect, though we witness a higher rate of “errors”, we still can easily locate the correct uses of the structure of “I have been (to)+some place” right from the first few sentences. The following misuses in “I been to” (instead of I’ve been to) structures might as well be attributed to learner’s thoughtless omission or simply a “slip of pen” and I’m more inclined to regard them as mistakes rather than errors in the light that it may be considered as “variations” in the participant’s performance, for instance that she was probably in a rush to do something else when she tried writing down the answers.

What is quite surprising to me is that, even if I had predicted that the errors in pluperfect may be considerably higher than the other two, the stunning 90% rate of errors(with only one occurrence of correct form) for such a relatively advanced learners still “caught me quite off guard”.

Figure3: The number of errors made in Pluperfect (in obligatory context, O. C) in each occasion:

Figure 4: The total number of errors make in Simple past tense, presentperfect and Pluperfect

S.P. Corder (1967) once distinguished error from mistakes by remarking: “We must make a distinction between those ‘errors’ which are products of lapses or slips of tongue and those which reveal learners’ underlying knowledge of the language to date, or, as we may call it his ‘transitional competence’”―which is generally synonymous to Selinker’s interlanguage. Therefore, the remarkable rising of such a “red flag”―the systematic and deeply rooted errors in learners’ use of pluperfect inspired me to delve into the problem further and endeavor to provide a more compressive and convincing explanation by taking more factors based on SLA theories into consideration.

4 Discussion and Conclusion

Inspired by Ellis suggestions that “erroneous uses of grammatical structures in the target language are traceable to many different sources: one source of errors may be negative transfer of mother tongue, grouped as interlingual errors;another source of errors may be semantic or syntactic complexity of the target language structures, as intralingual errors (1994:301)”, together with some conducive insights on the interlanguage and learner language, I would like to further my exploration into the root of Pluperfect errors in the following 6 aspects.

4.1Interlingual facters/Negative Transfer of L1

Chinese differs from English in that it does not appear to realize morphosyntactically the E(event)-S(speech)-R(reference) configuration . Crucially, it does not grammaticalize a past―non-past distinction required for locating E time in the past, and R time in the “past of the past” (Li and Thompson, 1981; Norman, 1988).

Despite the non-existence of tense in Chinese, there are some marked “aspects” in this language. It is argued by some scholars, pointing out the sentence-final particle “le” (signifying the completion of an event or ection) or the in-sentence particle “yijing”―(roughly translated as ‘already’) expressed the meaning of “perfect” and “pluperfect”. However, even the availability of such aspectual markers may bring more trouble than help to the Chinese learner in their learning of English tense, because in their mother tongue, such markers can be used in combination of almost all the different tenses, either present, past or future, which, without more meticulous clarification, could probably lead to more confusion than clarity. Therefore, Chinese learners could find difficulty in constructing a frame of reference to similar structures in Chinese to that of “Pluperfect” in English, and even if they have made such an effort, the construction may provecapricious and shaky, subject to negative L1 interference.

4.2 Intralangual factors

Complexity

1) Order of Emergence that causes the errors of inconsistent or incomplete application of rules

As mentioned in the literature review, the relative lateness in the order of emergence and the “duality” in interpretation of “Pluperfect”, to a more or less extent, keeps the learners from having a panoramic picture of the inherent complexity of Pluperfect.

In Klein’s studies of the European learners(1994), he warned that it is important to bear in mind that emergence order do not suggest that acquisition is in any way complete. Learners in no sense finish with one verbal morpheme before the interlangauge tense-aspect system admits the next. It throws light on the acquisition of Pluperfect in my case study and account for the inconsistency in the learner’s language performance in her production of simple past tense and past perfect tense.

2) Semantic complexity that causes “Overgeneralization” Errors

The complexity lies in the semantic interpretation of pluperfect also contribute to the learners’ errors in Pluperfect as they tend to overgeneralize the rules of the use of three different tenses.

Bardovi-Harlig(1995 ) points out that the overgeneralization of the pluperfect are divided between environments of the past and present perfect. Though the semantic association between the simple past and the pluperfect is clear : As every event that can be encoded by a pluperfect can also be encoded by the past. Thus all pluperfect are also past, however, the reverse in not true. Not all pasts are pluperfect, and the learners may have difficulty with this relationship. By the same token, similar arguments can be made for the relation of the pluperfect to the past, with which it shares semantic features: All pluperfects are also past, but not vice verso.

What is more, as indicated by Smith(1991), although morphosyntactically the present perfect and pluperfect are comparable in complexity, nevertheless, pluperfect emerge after the present perfect in the present corpus and Multiple factors such as semantic complexity syntactic complexity, frequency of input and functional load are all likely to contributing the acquisition order

Chinese language differs from English in that it is more a “meaning-oriented” and “graphic-manifested” language while English places great value on “logic thinking”and disciplined organization in narratives, such a semantic relationship of presupposition and entailment is not at all evident as it seems to native speakers and therefore it may readily give way to the occurrence of errors. My case study is just a very representative example. Though after many years “immersion”(which will be argued later) in native language and culture, it could still be hard for her to construct such a crystal clear and multilayered mapping of the intricate semantic relationship. Lots of Chinese English learners are blamed for not being able to “think” in English, yet such native-like automaticity, especially in the case of learning Pluperfect, seems especially hard if not impossible.

This leads to my further discussion based on some understanding of some theries of interlanguage development.

1) Avoidance:

By giving a further thought on the errors of pluperfect the learner had made, I discovered that even though the aspectual marker, such as the time adverbial, which is strongly suggestive of the use of past perfect tense and the module structure was given to the learners in my eliciting questions, such as “before your last year’s trip to …, what special preparation “had” you”made”…?”it seems that it doesn't really help much at all and the participant may simply “avoid” using the expected pluperfect structure, instead, substitute it with mistaken or questionable patterns of simple present, simple past or present perfect in the context where pluperfect is either obligatory or obviously a better choice.

What is more interesting to notice is that the learner tends to have her own “strategy” to use the much “tactic” and ambiguous “emphatic structure” such as “they did had a good time” where “ They had had a good time” is desired.

It is observed by Bardovi-Harlig(1999) that Chinese learners tend to overuse the simple past tense or present perfect tense in the pluperfect context, with a corresponding underuse of pluperfect or even non-use of pluperfect. Base on the understanding of such an interlanguage developmental phenomenon, which was first impled by DuSkovd (1969), who pointed out that the “lower frequency of an error need not necessarily mean that the point in question is less difficult” (p. 15) and further developed and confirmed by Schachter (1974) , Swain (1975) and other’ researches, I considered the errors made in pluperfect may be considered another typical instance of the phenomenon of Avoidance.

2) Fossilization

In Selinker’s study of interlangauge, he remarked that “second language learning is typified by incomplete success, the claimed systematic evolution of learner’s underlying interlanguage rules towards the target language system seems doomed, most often, never to integrate completely with its goal”. Indeed, as observed by many language teahers, while some learners go on learning, others seem to cease to make any visible progress, keep in their IL relative to a particular TL, no matter what the age of the learner or amount of explanation and instruction he receives in the TL. such phenomenon is defined as fossilization by Selinker(1969).

To me, in a sense, it can also be applied to the cases of quite a few advanced L2 learners. As shown in my case study, while the learner can produce some very colloquial, idiomatic and near authentic phrases or utterances like “It is not a big deal”, “a ‘stop babbling, give me peace’ gift”, “they don't get along” (though could be arguable whether it is formulaic “chunks” rather internalized language competence), it seems that they may still be confronted with great difficulty when they are compelled to use more complex structures like pluperfect, which is consider by some scholars to be an indicator as the watershed between intermediate and advanced, or even native and non-native learners.At this point, her language seems to have stabilized or “freezes”, and become stuck at more or less deviant stage.

Finally, a perspective of individual difference, which is a key issue in SLA, is take into the case study to account for her possible inadequacy understanding of Pluperfect.

In the subsequent casual interview, I revealed the real purpose for the “questionnaire”. Her response drew my attention and gave me a chance of see other dimensions that may explain her relative “ignorance” and the errors made in Pluperfect.

She told me the error analysis of such a complicated structure, Pluperfect, seems of little use or inspiration to her as she seldom use the past perfect tense and “it was not a big deal to me at all”. Besides, she said she was now much less concerned or self-conscious about the possible mistakes in her speech because she found there was no need to make a fuss about them as long as she could have herself across in communication. What is more, most of her customers(in her mother’s convenience store) are Chinese and her aim is to be a kindergarten teacher, to whom language proficiency may come to the back seat when versatility and practicality may be more prefered.

As we know, the success and failure in second language learning usually involves an interplay of many factors, such as motivation, attitude, values, input and output, etc. In this case study, when the participant seemed to be more motivated to learn English in when she first arrived in Australia as she was compelled to reach a certain proficiency to survive, if not thrive in the new environment and meet the personal and academic requirements. As Garden (1972) categorized the motivation into instrumental and integrative motivation, at that moment she has a rather high “instrumental motivation” and was really inspired to score a decent grade in IELTS test. However, her attitude towards pluperfect seems to imply that as the level of such motivation may no longer be that “instrumental” for her now. Besides, in a social-linguistic perspective, as she doesn't really have to use English for most of her negation with the customers, and she now lives in a not “English Immersion” environment, her inadequate authentic language input and output these years may also play a role to account for her failure to move onto a higher proficiency level as well.

5 Conclusion

In this research, I have made an effort to make a comprehensive account of the sources that cause the errors in learners’ production of Pluperfect and found that there are may factors that contribute to their failure in mastering such a complex and challenging grammatical structure. As pointed out in the research, both interlingual factors such as L1 native transfer and Intralingual factors such as the intrinsic syntactical, morphological, and semantic complexity are involved to explain the roots of the errors. I also attempt to combine the interlanguage theories and other SLA theories such as individual difference to substantiate the outcomes of thesis error analysis. Of course, this research is far from conclusive and there are many other and more sophisticated factors should be taken into consideration and would supply great insights that pave way to the further investigation.

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