Oversuppliance of the English simple past tense by Mandarin ESL learners
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Abstract
This study sought to determine if there would be L1 influence in the oral use of the English simple past tense in a semi-structured interview questions task as well as in a fill-in-the-gaps task. This research investigated the oversuppliance of the simple past tense in sentential contexts in which the simple past tense was ungrammatical. The participants of this study consisted of two different L1 groups – Mandarin, which lacks a grammatical past tense, and Tamil, which has a grammatical past tense. The results indicated that the Mandarin learners oversupplied the simple past tense more frequently on the oral task, as a proportion of the simple past tense forms they produced, than the Tamil participants, but not on the fill-in-the-gaps task.
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