Investigating the Role of Epistemic Models in Iraqi EFL Learners' Inaccurate Use of the English Present Tense Forms

Abstract

To investigate the source of difficulty faced by Iraqi EFL learners in using English present tense forms and uncover what makes their errors frequent and similar, this paper addressed the potential epistemic models which may underlie tense forms and impose specific meanings on them. It also tackled a couple of questions relevant to the relation between time and tense and whether the latter is a time signal per se. To answer these queries, a set of EFL learners' responses to tense related questions was collected from their academic test sheets and analyzed qualitatively. The analysis showed that disparity between the English and Arabic epistemic models leads the natives of each language to construe the tense related sceneries differently. The English present tense, for example, locates an event on a timeline which consists of temporal areas at different distance from the moment of speaking. This tense also shows its reality status depending on physical or virtual accessibility of that event at time of speaking. This contrasts with the Arabic concept of present tense which attributes the evolutionary phase of an event (rather than the event itself) to some agent causer[1] and the status of that phase is prototypically valued as unfulfilled reality regardless of time reference. Consequently, the learners' tendency to impose their native epistemic models on the English tense causes frequent errors whose similarity is stimulated by those models which represent the learners' shared epistemic knowledge in their cultural community and thus they do not fit the  English tense system.    

[1]*An agent causer is the doer of an action or the performer of an activity. An agent corresponds to the logical subject of a verb.