Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to show our analysis of students’ errors in elicited production tasks of the English progressive. Although the English progressive is one of the easiest forms to acquire, the ultimate acquisition of its form-meaning mapping is still difficult for Japanese learners of English. The Cognitive Linguistics framework considers the utilization of our cognitive abilities as key factors in language acquisition. From the framework of cognitive linguistics, Langacker (1987) advocated Cognitive Grammar, focusing on grammatical aspects of languages. In English aspect, he claims that there is a distinction between ‘perfective’ and ‘imperfective’ process. In a perfective process, properties (of a verb) change through time, while an imperfective process profiles a constant relation (Langacker 1987:261). Therefore, so-called ‘stative verbs’ designate imperfective process. Their stative nature fits into the simple present tense. When they are used in the progressive, that will suggest some kind of ‘changes’ (Langacker 1987:255-256).

In order to investigate the nature of students’ errors using the English progressive, we asked Japanese college students to complete several sentences by changing verb forms under several situations/contexts. After this task, we showed them audio-visual teaching material for the English progressive that we developed. We divided English verbs into three categories depending on their meanings and performance, e.g., activity verbs, achievement verbs, and stative verbs. Achievement verbs focus on the end-point of a process. Their progressive forms suggest something is going on toward the end-point, such as ‘reach a mountain’ or ‘arrive at the station.’ Among them, we chose materials using achievement verbs and stative verbs for our lesson because these two types are confusing for Japanese. After showing the moving pictures paired with a voice recording, we asked our students to perform the same sentence completion task. The resulting varied performance illustrates their different levels of abilities to link their understanding to performance.

The significance of this study lies in our method to explain the erroneous understanding of English progressive by Japanese learners of English through an analysis of their production tasks. Moreover, the improved performance in the second task shows that our audio-visual material was clear enough for the students to understand English aspectual system.

Keywords:

Cognitive Linguistics, English Progressive, Second Language Acquisition.