Understanding and Interpreting Data on the Learning of English Tenses and Verb Forms

About the Book

Guiding learners to acquire sufficient knowledge of grammar constitutes an interesting domain in the field of teaching English as a second language. This research-based resource book focuses on the learning of English tenses and verbal categories, which forms a huge and fascinating component of English grammar that merits attention in teachers’ attempts to improve their students’ English proficiency. Inspired by concepts relating to explicit learning, consciousness raising, contrastive analysis and error analysis, the author used a wealth of data derived from a set of elicitation procedures to reveal the linguistic interference encountered by second language learners. Arguing for the need to conceptualise grammatical rules positively, this inquiry focuses on studying learners’ wide-ranging responses to a large number of items designed to explore linguistic interference in the learning of English verb forms in eight major categories. The findings, explanations and illustration-based recommendations provided in this volume will give trainee teachers, instructors and researchers deeper insights into how strategies can be aptly employed to enhance learners’ performance in using English verb forms and related grammatical categories, which constitute a key dimension in the learning and teaching of English as a second language.

About the Author

Jason Miin-Hwa Lim is Full Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Malaysia Sabah. He has published extensively, and was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Lim is an Editorial Board Member of Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier).