Abstract:
This study investigated the acquisition of English irregular past tense morphology by L1 Chinese learners. The participants consisted of 60 L1 Mandarin-speaking learners of English divided into two groups according to their English proficiency levels, i.e., the intermediate and the advanced levels. The methodology included a Fill-in-the-Blank Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and an interview. Based on the Error Analysis Theory (Richards,1974; Ellis,1994), three research hypotheses were formulated. First, it was hypothesized that language proficiency has an impact on the acquisition of English irregular past tense by L1 Chinese learners and the findings conformed to the hypothesis. The results showed that correct English irregular past tense verb use in the intermediate group was significantly lower than that in the advanced group in both tests (p
