Abstract:

This study investigated 228 English as foreign language freshmen at a university of science and technology in southern Taiwan to explore the participants’ knowledge of English tense forms by recognizing 12 tense forms and translating Chinese sentences into English with specific tense forms. The results showed that the participants who were taught with the Comprehensive Charts of 24 Tense Forms outperformed their counterparts in the control group in recognizing the tense patterns and translating the present perfect continuous tense (at a significant level, p＜.05). However, the translation of the other two tense sentences did not reach the statistically significant level. The results of this study supported the researcher’s speculation in the previous study, Using Comprehensive Charts of Tense Forms to Teach EFL College Students, that the mastery of tense forms was closely related to the subjects’ English proficiency level and the non-written context. The instruction with the Comprehensive Charts particularly worked for students of the advanced level. A questionnaire designed to explore the participants’ preference of tense form teaching with the Comprehensive Charts indicated that 65.1 percent of the subjects preferred the focus on formS teaching (Doughty & Williams, 1998) and 64.7 percent of them deemed it was the most effective. This present study suggested storing the grammatical knowledge of tense forms in learners’ memory for future retrieval based on the “Instance Theory.” An Instructional Mode: Using the Comprehensive Charts for Teaching the Tense Forms was also appended.

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