engleski

Error Analysis of Perfect Aspect With Reference to Errors Made by Croatian Secondary School EFL Learners

Croatian secondary school learners are expected to be grammatically competent in their usage of the Perfect Aspect in the English language. Grammatical competence refers to knowledge and ability to correctly use grammatical structures. Error Analysis strives to explain errors learners make in their usage of the target language. This research attempted to examine and describe errors which learners make in their acquisition of the Perfect Aspect, and to what extent their mother tongue has influence on the acquisition. It was established that the greatest problem lies in the acquisition of the Future Perfect tense and its production. Of all three tenses (Future, Past, and Present Perfect Simple), Present Perfect was the least problematic. Indicative results point to the learners’ lack of knowledge on the tense usage and formation, which was confirmed in their prevalent usage of the intralingual strategies of ignorance of rule restriction and incomplete rule application. The assumptions made about the possible influence of their mother tongue made in the contrastive analysis were confirmed by the results. Interlingual errors were also slightly more common than the intralingual ones, which could also be an indication of insufficient attention paid to the tenses in question during the language instruction.

Second Language Acquisition; Perfect Aspect; Contrastive Analysis; Error Analysis

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