[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 13 | July 25, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
This study examined whether the self-reported use of English outside school by Mandarin-speaking and Tamil-speaking ESL learners played a role in the accuracy of the oral use of the simple past tense. The participants were primarily in their thirties and were mostly students in an ESL class of a lower intermediate or intermediate level of proficiency. This study used an interview questions task which was designed to elicit the oral use of the simple past tense. The results indicate that there is an interaction between L1 and the use of English outside an ESL school environment. The Tamil-speaking ESL participants who reported using English outside their ESL school were more accurate than those Mandarin-speaking ESL participants who also reported such use of English. For those learners who reported no use of English beyond the classroom, there was no difference in accuracy between the two L1 groups. However, the fact that the data on English use outside the class was self-reported throws some doubt upon the reliability of the data.
Previous SLA research indicates that L1 appears to play a role with regard to the accuracy of use of the simple past tense by ESL learners who speak different Chinese dialects (Goad, White & Steele, 2003, p. 245; Yang & Huang, 2004, p. 49). Mandarin Chinese-speaking ESL learners tend to have a low rate of accuracy in using the simple past tense in obligatory grammatical environments when apparently drawing on their procedural knowledge (Witton-Davies, 2004, pp.14-16).