The Role of Lexical Aspect in the Acquisition of Tense and Aspect

This article presents the results of a study investigating the acquisition of the simple past tense, identifies areas of difficulty, and presents an acquisitionally based approach to instruction for the problematic areas. The study, a cross-sectional investigation of 182 adult learners of English as a second language at six levels of proficiency, showed that the acquisition of the past tense in English is not a unitary phenomenon, but that it...