Tense and Aspect Difficulties Faced by Malaysian Chinese Students: A Case Study

Abstract

This study examines the written production of a group of Malaysian Chinese students when they were in the middle of their second semester of their Spanish language under graduate program at University of Malaya (UM). More specifically, this study employs Error Analysis to determine the type of errors committed in verb tenses when they were in Spanish III. The errors were classified according to the different grammatical functions they served. The results revealed that the misconception of verb tenses and aspect in Spanish have nothing to do with the languages they speak or how inflected the target language(s) may be, but that are rather influenced by other different and yet interrelated aspects in Second Language Acquisition such as: linguistic input and individual differences. This raises crucial theoretical questions as to whether L2 acquisition is influenced by the environmental factors that govern the input to which learners are exposed, or of internal mental factors which somehow dictate how learners acquire grammatical structures. Moreover, it was found that if problems in understanding and using verb tenses and aspects correctly and appropriately in Spanish are to be attributable to one phenomenon, that phenomenon is intraference and not so much interference.