This study investigated whether recasts provided during communicative interaction may improve Korean EFL learners’ accuracy with regard to regular and irregular English past tense forms, and whether individual differences in working memory capacity may intervene in the effects of recasts. To this end, forty-two Korean university students were placed into either the recast or the control group, and took the pretest and two types of working memory tests: phonological short-term and verbal. The learners participated in one-on-one conversational interactions with the researcher in three two-way communicative tasks one at a time on a weekly basis. Only the treatment group received explicit recasts on their past tense errors while the control group received no feedback of any kind. Finally, they took the posttest and completed the exit questionnaire. Results showed that recasts were beneficial for raising the learners’ accuracy level of English past tense forms, both regular and irregular, though the effects were much larger for the irregular forms. The improvements were not significantly correlated with neither of the working memory measures. Explicit and intensive recasting alone was sufficient in improving EFL learners’ English past tense accuracy in this one-on-one communicative interaction setting.

There are grammatical markers of tense that are obligatory in English and Korean, ho wever, these grammatical temporal forms are absent in Chinese. Although it is uncontrov ersial that Chinese does not morphologically encode tense, there are several other ways in which temporal information can be encoded (Smith&Erbaugh, 2005). Chinese is an aspect system language which marks aspect. On the contrast, English is a tense system languag e which marks tense. In our review of languages considered in this study, the main focus will be on aspect system and tense system which are illustrated by Chinese, English and Korean. The author will illustrate that the tense and aspect system of Chinese is different from that of Korean and English. Our argument in this paper focuses on three categories which can be referred to as the present, past and future. In chapter one, the motive of re search that difference of aspect and tense expression in Chinese, English and Korea was introduced and the course of this research was mentioned. A contrasting study was conducted in chapter two. As for contrasting the characteristics of three languages, the author hope that this paper would help to learn Chinese, English or Korean easily.

‘的’ is the most frequently used word. This paper is a study of the Tense-Aspect [时体] mark ‘的’. And it can be defined as follows. First, The Tense-Aspect [时体] mark ‘的’ is tenses and Aspect is present both in the transition period like English. Tense-Aspect [时体] mark ‘的’ has both the past tense and the certain aspect. Second, The ‘的’ is positioned between the center verb of the predicate and the object, and role to emphasize, and shows the certain aspect more clearly. Third, I contend that The ‘的’ in the structure ‘是 + VP + 的 + NP’ is also Tense-Aspect [时体] mark ‘的’. In that structure, ‘是’ is the adverb and it is not the center verb of the predicate. ‘的’ is Tense-Aspect [时体] mark.

Recasts have been at the center of much di scussion in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and a great deal of research has explored the effects of recasts on second language (L2) learning. However, there are st ill many issues and questions left to be answered. As a means of responding to these needs, the current study investigated the effectiveness of recasts in the accuracy development of child EFL learners in their use of past verb forms in English. The effectiveness of recasts was examined in relation to the type of past verbs (i.e., regular vs. irregular verbs) and the degree of exp licitness of recasts (i .e., implicit recasts vs. explicit recasts). Six elementary school students participated in the study and data were collected through a time-series design for 6 weeks. The analyses of the data showed that recasts were effective in enhancing the learners' accuracy in the use of both regular and irregular verbs. The learners benefited more from explicit recasts than implicit recasts in developing the accuracy of past verbs. However, improving the accuracy of regu lar verbs was more susceptible to explicit recasts than implicit recasts, while there was no significant difference in the gains of accuracy of irregular verbs in relation to the type of recasts.

This study examines the effects of the sequence of increasing task complexity in different modalities on the learning of the English past tense of Korean secondary learners. Robinson’s (2007) Cognition Hypothesis argued that learners pay more attention to grammatical forms in complex tasks than in less complex tasks. He suggested that tasks should be sequenced in such a way that resource-dispersing dimensions are first increased in complexity followed by an increase in the complexity of resource-directing dimensions. However, little empirical research has been done on how tasks are sequenced according to their cognitive complexity and how task modality affects second language development in the sequence. Fifty-four learners were divided into an integrated (writing with oral interaction) task group (EG 1), an oral-only task group (EG 2) and a comparison group (CG). After the sequence of six tasks was completed, one-way ANOVA revealed the EGs outperformed the CG significantly on the posttest. The mean score of EG 1 was the highest, while the improvement rate of EG 2 was the highest among the three groups. It is hoped that this result will contribute to building a solid basis on which practitioners can make decisions about sequencing tasks and implementing task modality.

The purpose of this study is to compare tense choices in writing research abstracts across different academic disciplines: Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS) and Natural Sciences & Technology (NST). Specifically, across the disciplines, it compares 1) tense distributions, 2) associations between tense choices and rhetorical functions, and 3) tense distributions in each of the rhetorical functions. One hundred research abstracts were randomly drawn from the Internet databases. Verb tenses and rhetorical functions of the main clauses in the abstracts were identified and the rhetorical functions were further classified as deictic functions and referential functions. Separate analyses were done for deictic functions and referential functions. The results showed that the conventions of tense choices were not different across HSS and NST. For example, tense distributions did not differ in both the disciplines in that the present tense was dominantly found the same for both. Deictic functions were not significantly associated with tense choices in both the disciplines and the tense distributions of each of the deictic functions did not differ across the disciplines. Referential functions, on the other hand, were significantly associated with tense choices in both the disciplines, and the tense distributions of each of the referential functions did not differ across the disciplines. Educational implications are also discussed about tense choices in writing abstracts.

Factors other than a time-sense relationship govern tense selection. Thus, it is misleading to teach verb tense choice based on time lines only. We need to point out the communicative purposes of verb tenses in discourse frames. Motivated by a concern for the pedagogical significance of studying tense choice in relation to rhetorical functions, this paper investigates tense choice in English research article abstracts written by English native speaking authors and Korean authors, using Hyland’s (2004) model. Few differences were found between the NS and the NNS. However, we can see that tense use conventions are changing, especially in the Product move, which corresponds to the Results move in general terms. Quite a few authors employed the present tense in the Product move which has conventionally preferred the use of the past tense. The results show that a question of tense choice in the Product move can not be clear-cut because choosing the present tense does not exclude the possibility of the past and vice versa. Nevertheless, the discussion in this study gives us the confidence to make judgements of modality we intend in appropriate ways.

This study investigates the effects of focus on form on the acquisition of the tense-aspect system in English by comparing two different instructional techniques, implicit and explicit focus on form. Furthermore, it examines which class of lexical aspect use is more applicable to each method of instruction. The implicit method is intended to produce the synergy of input flooding and typographical enhancement technique. The explicit method provides learners with pedagogical statements, corrective feedback, and some exemplars which are neither flooded nor visually enhanced. The subjects were Korean junior college students enrolled in two basic English writing classes. One class was assigned to an implicit group and the other to an explicit group. They received instruction for 10 weeks under two different learning conditions and were tested on the target structures. The results showed the overall effectiveness of implicit and explicit focus-on-form instructions on facilitating the two target structures, the simple past and present perfect, and on the lexical aspectual system as well. Although the implicit group made some progress, the gain was not statistically significant. The explicit group, however, made a significant progress in the learning of the present perfect. As for the lexical aspectual system, the implicit instruction somewhat influenced appropriate use of telic verbs, whereas the explicit instruction was more effective in facilitating the appropriate use of atelic verbs. The results indicate the importance of acquisition order and learners’ readiness in the learning of the present perfect.

In research Methods sections, the past tense is conventionally used. The verbs in the Methods section often deviate from the norm; Present-tensed verbs occasionally appear in the section. Through a preliminary analysis of Methods sections from 10 published journal articles, this study argues that verbs in the Methods section go exceptional when a certain concept is consistently involved. The characterization ‘coincidence in accessibility to information’ turns out to account for present-tensed verbs in the Methods section. Another supplementary analysis of Methods sections from 10 master's theses suggests student writers' uncertainty of the tense usage in the rhetorical section of Methods. The characterization proposed here may contribute to student writers' confident use of the present tense in research Methods sections.

It is well‐known in the literature of Korean linguistics that the difficulty with the semantic treatment of –ess lies in the fact that it can be used to refer to a past eventuality or a perfect eventuality, depending on the context of use. For this reason, after pointing out that it is of no use to posit that –ess is a past tense marker, a perfect marker, or both, this paper argues that –ess itself is neither a past tense marker nor a perfect marker, which completely departs from the previous treatments of –ess . To put it differently, -ess is indeterminate between a past tense marker and a perfect marker across the sentences in which it occurs. The context of use serves to resolve its indeterminacy by presenting the most salient semantic interpretation that may arise from –ess .

Chung (2001) claims that non-final conjuncts without overt tense morphemes which produce asymmetric tense interpretations are to be analyzed as TP; and Lee (2005) argues that the verbal honorific affix -si- never occurs in non-final conjuncts so honorific agreement between the subject and the verb takes place in the final conjunct only and thus the Korean gapping constructions should be analyzed as vP coordination. However, these two previous analyses seem to fail to make the generalizations on the distributional behaviors of gapping constructions, facing theoretical and empirical difficulties. To solve the problems they face, we claim that verbal gapping in Korean is allowed to occur in all non-final conjuncts when the covert predicates of the non-final conjuncts have an identical semantic relation value with that of the overt verb in the final conjunct, regardless of the consistency of the honorific and tense values between conjuncts.