Tense and Aspect in Second Language Acquisition - Chinese learners of Czech

Abstract

Czech is classified as a Slavic language of the Indo-European language family, while Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language. Both languages hold significant typological differences not only in terms of phonetics but also grammatical systems, and present different types of language characteristics. This book observes how Czech language learners whose L1 is Chinese have difficulties in learning and using specific grammatical categories that serve to highlight the fundamental differences between the two languages, which are both important and useful in helping learners to acquire their second language more successfully. This book is also the first learner corpus-based study of tense-aspect in both Chinese and Czech. Unlike previous related research, which have not always taken attested language use into account, the model of tense-aspect presented here is developed and tested by means of the learner corpora. The book outlines a new model of acquisition of tense-aspect in Czech for learners whose L1 is Chinese, based not only upon the investigation of Chinese and Czech individually, but also the fusion of linguistic evidence taken from the learner corpora of Czech from Chinese learners. The overall purpose of this book is to demonstrate how learner corpora and linguistic theory can interact. The content of this book is divided into seven chapters. The introduction presents a linguistic overview and comparison of Czech and Chinese. In the following chapters, a contrastive analysis of Czech and Chinese in specific grammatical categories is carried out. These grammatical categories include gender, number, case, tense, aspect, and modality. In chapter 3, the conceptual relationship between tense and aspect and the derived typology of languages are discussed. In chapters 4 and 5, the author pays attention to the tense-aspect systems in Czech and Chinese respectively, in order to summarize the language-specific properties of temporal expressions in these two languages. The analysis and subsequent discussions in chapter 6 are based on the corpora from the Corpus of Czech as Second Language (CzeSL) and the NCCU Learner Corpus of Slavic Languages (LCSL). In the concluding section, the author summarizes three main points as follows: First, native Chinese speakers learning Czech, and vice versa, can find in this book a further analysis and relevant support for the interpretation of Bhat’s Aspect-prominent languages (1999). Secondly, the importance of the Czech aspectual learning sequence for Chinese learners is emphasized. It is further suggested that the first step in learning Czech aspects is to distinguish which verbs have aspectual pairs, and progressively to study whether the form of a particular verb is perfective or imperfective. The author further points out that Czech verbal suffixes denoting aspectual meaning can easily confuse Chinese learners, because they are characterised by both aspect and verbal inflection, peculiarities that are not present in the Chinese language. The final point stresses the importance of the ability to recognize those conceptual categories that are different from those in the source language. For instance, learners have difficulties in understanding the tense and aspect in Czech, when they do not clearly understand the differences in conceptualization of time between Chinese and Czech. It is further assumed to be helpful to predict points of learning difficulties, in order to further improve language acquisition. The starting point of this book is a cross-lingual approach to Czech and Chinese that aims to develop a learner corpus-based contrastive study between the two languages, investigating not only their individual particularities within the categories of tense-aspect, but also trying to highlight their similarities. In addition, the author believes that this book will be of great importance to learners of the Czech language whose L1 is Chinese and learners of the Chinese language whose L1 is Czech, both in terms of research and teaching practice.