Volume 7-4 August 2011.

PDF E-book version

Title
Investigating the Primacy of Aspect in the Performance of Iranian EFL Learners

Authors
Mohammad Ali Farsidoust (M.A.)
Shiraz Honar Higher Education Institute, Iran

Firooz. Sadighi, (Ph.D.)
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

Mahboobeh Saadat (Ph.D.)
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

Bio data
Mohammad Ali Farsidoust M.A. Shiraz Honar Higher Education Institute, Shiraz, Iran

Firooz Sadighi, Ph.D. Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

Mahboobeh Saadat Ph.D. in TEFL. She is an assistant professor at Shiraz University, Iran. Her areas of interest include syntax and language learning. She has already published some articles on the issues as well as others.
      

Abstract
 The phenomenon of limiting tense-aspect markers to a restricted class of verbs (Vendler's, 1967 four-way classification) according to the inherent aspect of the verb is known as the Primacy of Aspect (Robison, 1995; Andersen and Shirai, 1996). By taking the POA principles into consideration it is possible to account for language learners' tense-aspect problems. The present study aims at answering some questions concerning this phenomenon such as testifying the presence of POA in the learners' performance, investigating and explaining the order of verb patterns, investigating the learners' errors and probing the effect of language transfer in this regard. Using Vendler's (1967) classification, a lexical aspect test comprising four verb types with their tokens was devised and administered to 120 EFL learners at three proficiency levels of elementary, intermediate and advanced.  The results did not confirm all of the POA principles but provided evidence for the influence of lexical aspect categories and indicated that the major problems of the learners had their roots in aspect rather than tense. Also the results of this study supported the English data obtained so far.

Keywords: Grammatical tense, Grammatical aspect, Lexical aspect, Verb types, Vendlerean classification (1967), language acquisition.