Chapter Three Experimental Design
The present study intends to examine the use of the English present perfect by
Taiwanese EFL learners in the high school stage, and find out what meaning(s) of the
present perfect may cause the greatest confusion, and what tenses students misuse for
present perfect. The results are hoped to reflect the flaws in the English present
perfect instruction and provide EFL/ESL teachers some suggestions in teaching this
form. This chapter will start with the research hypotheses of the present study, and
then reveal the design derived from the hypotheses, including its subjects and
methodology.
3.1 Research Hypotheses
This study investigates high school students’ familiarity with the various uses of
the English present perfect. From the meanings and functions of this form, the
observations of its acquisition in the first language, and the characteristics of Chinese,
several hypotheses are made concerning the acquisition of the present perfect in the
ESL/EFL. More specifically, the present study attempts to test the following
hypotheses:
1. The present perfect is a cognitively and functionally complex form in
comparison with the simple past; therefore, learners’ overall performance of
the present perfect will reflect its difficulty:
(a) The accuracy rate of the simple past will be higher than that of the
present perfect.
(b) When learners misuse other tenses in place of the present perfect, they
tend to use the most similar but less marked simple past.
(c) Learners are less familiar with the discourse function of the present
perfect for they mainly encounter this form at sentence level.
2. The four functions of the present perfect – ‘continuative perfect’,
‘experiential perfect’, ‘resultative perfect’, and ‘perfect of recent past’ are
acquired at different rates by Chinese learners, due to the different degrees of
conceptual saliency proved in the L1 acquisition:
(a) Learners will grasp the use of ‘continuative perfect’ and ‘experiential
perfect’ earlier because the two functions are more cognitively salient
and introduced as prototypes in the junior high school textbook, thus the
performance will not be significantly divergent between the two groups
due to this early acquisition.
(b) Learners of higher proficiency will show better performance in using
‘resultative perfect’ and ‘perfect of recent past’.
(c) Learners will tend to use simple past in the ‘recent past’ contexts due to
the interchangeability of the present perfect and simple past in such
contexts in American English.
3. Learners’ performance of the present perfect reflects interference from their
first language. Learners will refer to the Chinese aspectual markers for
similar meanings when using the English present perfect. In addition,
influenced by prolific use of temporal adverbials in Chinese, learners will
rely on the additional temporal adverbial phrases in the English contexts:
(a) Learners perform better on the functions that Chinese aspectual markers
le and guo share with the English present perfect, i.e. ‘recent past’ over
the ‘continuative’, ‘experiential’ and ‘resultative’ functions.
(b) There is a negative transfer on the use where Chinese aspects and
English present perfect differ, in terms of the use of temporal adverbials
and verb features.
(c) Learners will use present perfect more accurately where there is a
temporal adverbial, such as since, for, already, ever, and yet.
(d) They will overuse present perfect with the presence of such adverbials,
even though other tenses are preferred.
(e) Learners of higher proficiency will have better performance in the
contexts without adverbials.
4. Owing to the inadequate understanding of the complicated present perfect,
learners may avoid using this form in their spontaneous writing.
3.2 Subjects
There were two groups of subjects participating in this study, covering the first
graders and the third graders in the senior high school. One group consisted of 68
third-year students at Taipei Municipal Xi-Song Senior High School and Taipei
County Hai-Shan Senior High School, with an average of 6.7 years of English
learning experience. The other group consisted of 75 first-year students at Taipei
Municipal Xi-Song Senior High School and Taipei County Hai-Shan Senior High
School, with an average of 4.8 years of English learning experience. The selection
of the students from senior high school was based on the consideration that they were
exposed to more input of the English present perfect than the junior high school
students. Since this form is introduced late, in the third year of the junior high
school, learners at this stage have rare further exposure to it in the following texts.
Their knowledge of the present perfect thus is petty and insufficient to reveal the
nature of the form.
3.3 Method
Results of the present perfect usage were collected through a blank-filling test and
a writing task (Appendix One). The blank-filling test was composed of 57 blanks, 36
of which are located in dialogues, 21 in narrations. The design of dialogues was
based on that a speaker’s pragmatic consideration is often better revealed in the
interlocutions, and the pragmatic function is usually a main concern in using the
present perfect. For each question item, subjects were free to use whatever tense
they thought appropriate. The writing task asked subjects to write a paragraph about
a person they admired.
The purpose of adopting the blank-filling test was to investigate learners’
knowledge of using the present perfect for different functions. To look at the
familiarity of the learners with the different uses of the English present perfect,
questions eliciting the continuative perfect, experiential perfect, resultative perfect,
and perfect of the recent past were distributed randomly in the blank-filling test; the
categorization followed Huddleston and Pullum’s (2003). The test instruction did
not give the subjects hints to answer in certain tenses because the test was hoped to
find out what tenses learners most often misuse for present perfect. However, such
elicitation could not fully reflect students’ acquisition of the English present perfect.
Therefore, the writing task was expected to disclose students’ knowledge of the form
in spontaneous use.
3.3.1 Instruments
The content of the blank-filling test is discussed in greater detail here. In the
blank-filling test (Appendix One), there were 37 potential places for the present
perfect, 10 for simple past. The latter group meant to check learner’s performance of
the less marked simple past comparing with the more marked present perfect. In
addition, in order to eliminate the shadow effect, 8 items were included in the test as
distracters. Still there were 2 blanks for simple present, which were included to test
whether the subjects could make correct judgment at seeing adverbial ‘for’. Among
the 37 items for present perfect, 11 were of the use of continuative, 11 of experiential,
10 of resultative, and 5 of recent past. The disproportion of the first three functions
to ‘perfect of recent past’ reflected the frequency of occurrence in American English.
Table 5 illustrates the allocation of test items for each testing category:
Category Item Number Continuative Perfect 7, 9, 10, 17, 25, 36, 37, 39, 45, 46, 55 11
Experiential Perfect 1, 3, 4, 13, 15, 26, 33, 35, 41, 48, 57 11 Resultative Perfect 14, 16, 21, 27, 29, 32, 38, 50, 53, 54 10
Perfect of Recent Past 6, 12, 20, 28, 49 5
Simple Past 8, 18, 19, 22, 40, 42, 43, 47, 51, 52 10
Simple Present 5, 34 2
Present Perfect with Adverbials
1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 15, 17, 21, 25, 27, 33, 39, 46, 48, 50, 57 (overlapped)
(16)
Other Tenses with Adverbials
5, 19, 22, 34, 52 (overlapped) (5)
Possible Negative Transfer 25, 46 (overlapped) (2)
Discourse Function 50, 54 (overlapped) (2)
Distracters 2, 11, 23, 24, 30, 31, 44, 56 8
Total 57
Table 5: Allocation of test items for each category
On the test sheets given to the subjects, Chinese equivalents were provided for
difficult words in order to avoid the possibility of misjudgment resulting from failure
to understand the language.
3.3.2 Test Administration
The blank-filling test was given separately from the writing task in order to avoid
the shadow effect. The blank-filling test was administered in 40 minutes and the
writing 30 minutes. The subjects sensed that the test meant to examine their use of
English tenses, but did not exactly know it focused on the present perfect since other
tenses and the distracters were provided.
3.4 Design of the Test
This section introduces the design of the test items and explains how they map
onto the research hypotheses.
3.4.1 Cognitive and Functional Complexity
The first hypothesis predicted that learners would perform better in the simple
past, for this form is cognitively simpler than present perfect. If learners fail to use
present perfect, they would most likely use simple past because this form shares most
features with present perfect yet is less marked. Hence, subjects were supposed to
answer the following items with higher accuracy:
# Mrs. Yang: Yeah! I (8)_____________ <hear> of that in the evening news.
# Teacher: You (18) _____________ <miss> two English classes just last week!
# Grandpa: I (19) _____________ <already, eat> earlier. It tastes good,
doesn’t it?
# Husband: Oh I haven’t noticed that. How much (22) _____________ <we,
spend> for last month then?
# Coal( ) (40) _____________ <seem> an acceptable source until people
became aware of its polluting quality.
# The boy (42)_____________ <throw> a carrier bag at the shopkeeper and
ordered her to fill it up.
# “I don’t know whether he (43)_____________ <want> me to fill the bag with
sweets or money,” said the shopkeeper.
# Four years ago, I think. We (47) _____________ <go> to Natalie’s wedding.
# “Crouched Tiger, Hidden Dragon( )” aroused( ) Americans’ interest
in the martial art( ), and the following Kungfu movies all (51)
_____________ <achieve> good box office( ).
# But the heat (52) _____________ <cool> down for a long time because there
were no Kungfu movies as impressive shown in Hollywood.
Besides, the present perfect also plays more functions than the simple past.
One of them is the discourse function. The discourse functions can be found in some
text types, such as news reports, letters to the editor, biography, and obituary (Zydatiss,
1986; cited in McCarthy, 1991); however, these text types were not familiar to the
Chinese learners at the high school stage. Therefore, they might fail to use present
perfect in the blanks below:
# Chinese Kungfu( ) (50) _____________ <gain> popularity in the U.S. lately.
# Harry Potter's magic (54) _____________ <touch> a huge audience of all ages
all over the world.
3.4.2 Uses of the Present Perfect
The second research hypothesis predicts learners’ performance discrepancy in the
different uses of the present perfect. The acquisition rates of the four functions of
the present perfect – ‘continuative’, ‘experiential’, ‘resultative’, and ‘recent past’ are
not the same in the first language due to the different cognitive and functional load
each carries. It was predicted that the same phenomenon would be found in the
second language acquisition. When the functions are salient, Chinese learners of
English are assumed to acquire them earlier. Thus, they were predicted to perform
better in ‘continuative’ and ‘experiential’ perfect. Moreover, these two uses are
introduced first in the textbook and receive more attention. As to the less salient
functions, i.e. ‘resultative perfect’ and ‘perfect of recent past’, learners’ performance
was expected to improve as their proficiency grew. With continuous exposure to
present perfect in their contact with English, they would get hold of the different uses
of the present perfect. Consequently, the accuracy rate would be improved in the
group of third graders, particularly on the items of ‘resultative perfect’. As for
‘perfect of recent past’, because it is interchangeable with simple past and therefore
occur less often in American English, learners would tend to use simple past in the
items for ‘recent past’.
Continuative perfect
This category was supposed to have higher accuracy rate:
# Painter: A lot of people (7) _____________ <ask> about it, and I always say
it’s not for sale.
# Miss Yu: Well, I (9) _____________ <keep> those secrets for a lifetime. I
think it’s time to let go.
# Young man: Don’t tell me you (10) _____________ <live> so far without
using one.
# Teacher: You’d better not be absent from class again for the rest of the
term( ). You (17) _____________ <already, miss> too many
classes.
#David: No, Sir! I (25) _____________ <finish> for a long time. Here it is.
# Interviewer: I have never been to any of those countries. I (36) __________
<always, want> to travel to those places.
# For example, the contents of libraries (37) _____________ <change> greatly
through the years.
# Since the discovery of electricity, there (39) _____________ <be> a debate( )
about how to generate( ) the electricity we need.
# I think the beard suits him because he (45) _____________ <lose> a lot of hair
in the past few years.
# Can you believe that, we (46) _____________ <graduate> for ten years!
# They (55) _____________ <be translated( )> into 61 languages and
distributed in over 200 countries.
Experiential perfect
Learners were also predicted to be more familiar with this use:
# George: Hi, Jill. Welcome to my birthday party. (1) _____________
<you, ever, meet> my cousin?
# Dan: It sucks( )! I (3) _____________ <write> to them three times,
but I still haven’t received a reply.
# Wife: Well, I (4) _____________ <never, try> rabbit meat. I think I’ll order
that.
# Security guard: Ma’am, you’d better be careful. There (13) _____________
<be> three cases of missing children this week.
# Student A: (15) _____________ <you, take> any English test recently?
# Tour guide: Look! This is the oldest tree in the town. It (26) ___________
<survive> many typhoons and now is still flourishing( ).
# Wendy: I (33) _____________ <never, wait> so desperately( ).
# Interviewer: What countries (35) _____________ <you, visit>?
# So we (41) _____________ <not, find> an ideal way to generate power.
# I (48) _____________ <never, be> there before and I don’t want to get lost and
be late.
# The author J. K. Rowling (57) _____________ <win> many prizes and awards
so far.
Resultative perfect
Subjects were assumed to answer this category with lower accuracy because the
actions of past happenings do not continue to the present, only the states do.
Therefore, this function is less salient as the former two. But learners of higher
proficiency were supposed to show improvement in this use.
#Camille: Fine. Well, Sam, I hope you (14) _____________ <forgive( )>
me now about that day.
# Student B: I don’t know. I (16) _____________ <not, get> the result.
# Wife: Gee! The prices of commodities( ) have gone up! We (21)
_____________ <spend> NT$ 12,000 on groceries( ) this
month already!
# Husband: (27) _____________ <your sister, arrive> yet?
# Sister-in-law: Yeah, you too, Chris. I am on a diet, and guess what! I (29)
_____________ <lose> 2 kilos in one week! Everyone says I
am in a perfect shape.
# Andrew: I don’t think so. We (32) _____________ <not, have> much rain
this year. The river may be too thin for rafting.
# However, today most libraries (38) _____________ <become> multimedia(
) centers that contain books, tapes, computers, films, magazines, and
paintings.
# Chinese Kungfu( ) (50) _____________ <gain> popularity in the U.S. lately.
# Actors like Jackie Chen( ), Jet Li( ), and even Stephen Chow( )
(53) _____________ <make> Kungfu shine in the West again.
# Harry Potter's magic (54) _____________ <touch> a huge audience of all ages
all over the world.
Perfect of recent past
This use has the least occurrences in American English and thus not salient to
learners. As a result, subjects tended to use simple past in this category even though
they were expected to grasp this function with the growth of English proficiency:
# Nancy: What’s the matter? Your eyes are red and watery. (6) ___________
<you, just, cry>?
# Woman: Oh! Thank God! Where (12) _____________ <you, be>, Timmy?
I’ve been looking for you like crazy!
# Louis: But I (20) _____________ <just, finish> one. Well, doctor said I
needed to cut back caffeine( ) intake.
# Wife: Yes, she is already here. She (28) _____________ <just, get> our
home. Marty!
# She (49) _____________ <just, move> there and is having a party to celebrate.
3.4.3 L1 Interference
Since Chinese aspect markers le and guo are related to the English present
perfect and overlap all the four functions, these uses are assumed to be noticeable to
Chinese learners of English. However, in Chinese, additional temporal adverbials
are also used to locate the events. To decode the temporal reference, Chinese
speakers rely on both the aspectual markers and the adverbials. Without such hints
in an English context, Chinese learners may be less certain about the tenses/aspects
appropriate to use. Moreover, verb types used for the ‘continuative perfect’ contexts
and the ‘resultative perfect’ ones are not mutually excluded in Chinese, that is, an
instantaneous verb can be used together with a duration of time, simply under the
influence of le in the meaning of ‘change of state’. Such usage is not applicable in
English, and it is likely that Chinese learners carry this use to the English contexts
without being aware. In the following items, learners were predicted to show
negative transfer of L1:
# David: No, Sir! I (25) _____________ <finish> for a long time. Here it is.
# Can you believe that, we (46) _____________ <graduate> for ten years!
As noted, additional temporal markers in the English contexts may help learners
to make judgment on the appropriate tenses. Since the present perfect is a more
difficult tense-aspect for Chinese learners, they will heavily rely on the adverbials like
for, since, ever, and never when using this form. Hence, the accuracy rate was
expected to be higher when such adverbials appeared in the contexts. Moreover, due
to learners’ association of these adverbials with the present perfect, they were
assumed to overuse present perfect in the items with them. However, as the
proficiency grows, learners are predicted to reduce their dependence on the temporal
adverbials:
Present perfect with adverbials
Subjects were expected to answer these items more accurately:
# George: Hi, Jill. Welcome to my birthday party. (1) _____________ <you,
ever, meet> my cousin?
# Dan: It sucks( )! I (3) _____________ <write> to them three times,
but I still haven’t received a reply.
# Wife: Well, I (4) _____________ <never, try> rabbit meat. I think I’ll
order that.
Miss Yu: Well, I (9) _____________ <keep> those secrets for a lifetime. I
think it’s time to let go.
# Young man: Don’t tell me you (10) _____________ <live> thus far without
using one.
# Student A: (15) _____________ <you, take> any English test recently?
# Teacher: You’d better not be absent from class again for the rest of the term(
). You (17) _____________ <already, miss> too many classes.
# Wife: We (21) _____________ <spend> NT$ 12,000 on groceries( )
this month already!
# David: No, Sir! I (25) _____________ <finish> for a long time. Here it is.
# Husband: (27) _____________ <your sister, arrive> yet?
# Wendy: I (33) _____________ <never, wait> so desperately( ).
# Since the discovery of electricity, there (39) _____________ <be> a debate( )
about how to generate( ) the electricity we need.
# Can you believe that, we (46) _____________ <graduate> for ten years!
# I (48) _____________ <never, be> there before and I don’t want to get lost and
be late.
# Chinese Kungfu( ) (50) _____________ <gain> popularity in the U.S. lately.
# The author J. K. Rowling (57) _____________ <win> many prizes and awards
so far.
Other tenses with adverbials
Subjects were predicted to overuse present perfect for the following items though
a simple past or a simple present was required:
# Son: It’s boring! Grandma (5) _____________ <talk> about trivia( ) for
hours every time, no matter I am interested or not.
# Grandpa: I (19) _____________ <already, eat> earlier. It tastes good,
doesn’t it?
# Husband: Oh I haven’t noticed that. How much (22) _____________
<we, spend> for last month then?
# Interviewee: Yes, I like to travel. I (34) _____________ <travel> for a month
every year.
# But the heat (52) _____________ <cool> down for a long time because there
were not Kungfu movies as impressive shown in Hollywood.
3.4.4 Performance in Writing
Taiwanese students often receive the language instruction in a passive way, and
their acquisition is usually assessed through elicitation tests. Consequently, they are
both less comfortable with and weaker at the spontaneous production. It was
assumed that students tended to avoid using present perfect in the writing task.
3.5 Correction of Tests
For the blank-filling test, the errors of the past participle form of verbs were
ignored. As long as subjects put in have/has with verb inflections, they were
considered attempting to use present perfect. So learners’ insufficient knowledge of
verb inflections were not deemed as their disability to apply present perfect. Those
items served as distracters were disregarded and excluded from the later analysis.
For the writing task, the instruction implied that some descriptions contained the
meanings the present perfect coded, like duration and experience. Therefore, the
following ideas were expected to be in the present perfect in learners’ writings:
# I have been a fan of XXX for two years.
# I have seen him in person.
# I have got all his albums.
# I have been to all his concerts.
# He has made me love R&B.
If the subjects failed to use present perfect, or they paraphrased these ideas with other
tenses, they were regarded as avoiding using it. A native speaker from Canada
helped to identify the clauses which required the use of present perfect. Subjects’
use of other tenses was deemed as their preference in the spontaneous production.
