One of current interests in English education is how the learners' communicative competence could be improved. This study therefore sets forth the fact that the grammatical competence is the essential element in communicative competence as a premise b...
One of current interests in English education is how the learners' communicative competence could be improved. This study therefore sets forth the fact that the grammatical competence is the essential element in communicative competence as a premise based on the preceding studies.
The verb is one of the most important grammatical categories in English, and the system of tense and aspect in English are very different from those in Korean. Furthermore, the concepts of tense and aspect are totally different from each other. Tense indicates the moment that the action of the verb takes place, while aspect indicates whether the action is completed or on-going (perfect or progressive). However, what we can see in most of textbooks for junior or junior high schools is the notion 'tense' combines those of tense and aspect, and teaching tense and aspect in classroom has a bias toward just focusing on the verbs' forms with time relation. Without conscious recognition of these two different concepts and the meaning of each different aspect learners may be confused or have difficult time in using verbs in real communicative situation. It thus appears that there might be occurred the breakdown of flow in communication or misunderstanding between interlocutors. Therefore, aspect should be separated from tense as a independent and flexible grammatical category. It is expected that it might help students to understand the concepts of tense and aspect properly, and it thus will help to improve their grammatical competence and ultimately communicative competence.
The survey in this study is for investigating the student's ability of tense and aspect in use. The 99 third-grade students in C high school were chosen at random for this survey. The results show that they have slightly better ability for tense than for aspect. The perfect aspect is the one that they have most difficulty with, while the present tense is the one that they have least difficulty with.