A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF TENSE FORMATION AND USAGE IN JABA AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE

A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF TENSE FORMATION AND USAGE IN JABA AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Abstract:

The study investigated the use of tense forms to express time relations of different actions or events in written English of Kanyi dialect learners of English language. It also investigated reasons for the learners’ inability to appropriately use the tense forms. For an effective presentation, the study was divided into five chapters. The first chapter contained the introduction which highlighted the background of the study and the statement of the research problem. The statement of the problem was to investigate Kanyi (Jaba) learners’ problems with tense formation and its implication to learning while the aim of the study was to make a comparative study and analysis of the tense formation in English and Kanyi (Jaba) language as well as to investigate and highlight the syntactic patterns of both languages regarding tense formation and usage and how the differences that existed between them could affect Kanyi learners of English as a second language. The second chapter contained some related literature review on some related studies on contrastive analysis, second language learning and the meaning of tense in English. The third chapter discussed the methodology and the theoretical framework. Before selecting the theoretical framework, some grammatical theories were discussed. These included the transformational grammar theory, the traditional grammar theory, the systemic functional grammar theory and structural grammar theory. Having recognized the indepth analysis of the theories, the transformational grammar theory was selected as the framework. The method employed in this study was the translation method. This method was used especially if the researcher is bilingual in both languages. The fourth chapter dealt with the analysis of the data collected by the use of different tables for each of the tense form that was tested. The findings were brought to light after analysing the data that was collected. It was discovered that the tense morpheme in both languages occurred after the subject (similarity). It was also discovered that the major difference in them lied in the use of inflections. For instance, while English language adds the inflections ‘s’, ‘es’ to the verb when using the present tense, and ‘d’ or ‘ed’ added to the verb when using the past tense, the Kanyi speaker uses tone (rising or falling tone) to differentiate between the two tenses. In English language the present tense is used in relation with the persons of the noun or pronoun while in Kanyi (Jaba) language, the present tense is not used in relation with the persons. The first, second and third persons take the uninflected forms of tense morpheme or verb. The learning implications was discussed in chapter four. It is assumed that the differences in the tense classification between the two languages could cause problems for the learners. The last chapter contained the summary, conclusion, further areas of research and the limitations of the study.

A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF TENSE FORMATION AND USAGE IN JABA AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE