Interlanguage: Activity 1
Patterns in tense marking
Please read the information about interlanguage before working through these activities.
In contrast to error analysis, interlanguage analysis takes a learner's perspective and seeks patterns in their language use, and rules that can account for these patterns.
Watch Anna B’s and Sophia’s Retell tasks. What patterns do you see for each learner in terms of tense marking? Do the learners mark past tenses consistently? Do they use future tense? Is the pattern the same for the two learners or different? Describe it.
Anna B Retell
Transcript (PDF)
Sophia RetellPlease type your answers to the questions in the box below.
When you have finished typing your answer, click to compare your response with the Learner Language staff response.
Sophia and Anna B both mark past tense on most main verbs, but they do show different patterns. Sophia marks past tense correctly on verbs in the Retell task except for just one sentence “새 케이크 사라 가요” ([She] goes to buy a new cake). She also uses future tense in her answer where she needs to predict what would happen next in line 16, “필요할 거예요” ([It] will be needed). Based on the given data, Sophia’s interlanguage includes past tense and future tense for verbs and adjectives.
Anna B, in contrast, seems to use past tense only with action verbs, not with stative verbs or auxiliary verbs. She uses present tense on stative verbs, such as ‘무섭다 (to be scared)’ or ‘심심하다 (to be bored)’, and present tense on the auxiliary verb ‘-어/아야 되다 (have to)’ even when the main verbs are action verbs. She doesn’t use future tense in the Retell task.
Thus, while Sophia uses present, past, and future tense, Anna B mostly uses present tense, with past tense reserved only for action verbs. She doesn't show evidence of having a rule for future tense.
