Acquisition of Future Tense by Persian L2 Learners of English

One of the major differences between L1 and L2 acquisition is that L2 learners have already attained a full competence in L1. This in turn may pose certain transfer effects in the acquisition of L2 structure. Among the syntactic structures is the tense system which is not the same across languages. A time reference can be represented by different tenses. To illustrate, future time can be indicated by simple future or present progressive in English. Contrastive studies in literature show that Iranian EFL learners face certain learnability problems in learning future tense due to differences in the way the future tense is realized in the two languages. The phrasal future tense in Persian is constructed with the helping verb’’ xaastan’’. Persian does not have a variety of future tenses compared with English. The indicative present can be simply used to convey futurity. Such differences can cause problems for EFL learners when they try to use the future tense or translate English tenses into Persian or vice versa. The current study compares the grammatical devices that indicate the future in English with their corresponding tenses in Persian. Four kinds of future tense are used to compare the two languages. The tenses include (1) Simple future; (2) Future progressive; (3) Future perfect and (4) Future perfect progressive. Given the above it is clear that the grammatical devices expressing future tense in English far outweigh those in Persian. Thence Persian learners will face learnability problems in acquiring future tense.The major aim of this study is to identify Persian EFL learners’ problems in acquiring and utilizing English future tense (EFT). This inquiry also sheds light on the role of proficiency in the acquisition process. The participants of this study being split into 25 intermediate and 25 advanced levels were decided upon according to the result of an OQPT. To meet the aforementioned purposes, the participants were administered 16 sentences to be translated from Persian into English. Further, a questionnaire consisting of 16 completion tests and 16 recognition tests on four types of simple future, future perfect, future progressive, and future perfect progressive was attempted by the same participants. The results of the study indicated that the L2 learners have the least difficulty in the acquisition of simple future whereas they experience the most difficulty with future perfect progressive in both suppletion and translation tasks. The results further indicated that the L2ers perform significantly better in the perception task

کلیدواژه ها:

learnability problems ، future tense ، transfer ، proficiency