Acquisition of English progressive morpheme –ing for Chinese learners

Abstract

Grammar is one of the most difficult parts of English learning for Hong Kong students since the first language (L1) - Chinese does not have the spelling system that second language (L2) - English has. The writing system of Chinese uses large numbers of individual characters corresponding to meanings while English makes use of a small number of letters corresponding to sounds. Thus, it is normal for the students to make countless errors when they practice using English grammar, one of which is the doubling error of the final consonant in present continuous verb. This error happens because it is concerned with the phonological knowledge of English which is not included in the primary school curriculum. That is why the writer of this paper is interested in analyzing the doubling errors of the L2 English learners. The writer used descriptive quantitative design which was applied to obtain information concerning the doubling error of the students in using present continuous tense. The population of this research was a class of 25 L2 students studying English in a public primary school. The instruments were a written test and an individual interview. The written test contains 21 fill-in-the-blank questions. Only 14 questions are used to test the present continuous tense and the rest are used as filters. Within these 14 questions, 4 of them are based on the actual verbs and 10 of them are based on non-sense verbs. The actual verbs are used as the control whereas the non-sense verbs are used to illustrate their phonological knowledge in relation to the final consonant doubling. Based on the result of the analysis of data, it was found that the average correctness of non-sense verbs in the test by 25 students is 54.8%. Through the interview, it is found that 9 students start learning English since kindergarten while 16 students start since primary school. The finding shows that the years of exposure to English does not affect the performance of the students in using present continuous tense as the students started learning English since primary school have better results than those since kindergarten. The interview also suggests that the explicit teaching of the spelling rules can enhance the performance of the students on present progressive tense.