Joanna Siu examined the usage patterns of English present perfect — a grammar focus that poses immense theoretical and pedagogical challenges within the domain of tense and aspect — among advanced English learners from Hong Kong. Joanna’s ingenuity in coming up with simple and effective tasks, namely translation and narrative story telling with a psycholinguistic twist, far exceeded my expectation. This endeavour would have required a solid understanding of the vast literature, which may take years to develop. Yet Joanna mastered it within a span of three months. The transformation, from a complete novice to a budding expert, is illuminating. Her project, though small in scale, yields new findings that hold important theoretical and practical implications to second language acquisition at large. Her co-authored abstract has been accepted by a leading international conference on tense, aspect, and modality in L2, scheduled to take place at the University of York, UK, on 20th and 21st June 2016. This is due recognition of Joanna’s sharp intellectual insights and commitment to applied language issues.

The project seeks to investigate the acquisition of English tense and aspect system by advanced Cantonese learners of English. It focuses on the role of lexical aspect of verbs and possible Cantonese influence on the learning of English as a second language, with particular reference to English present perfect. The temporal system between Chinese and English is very different. English temporality is a combination of three tenses and two aspects, while scholars in general believe that Chinese is a tenseless language. Previous researches had highlighted the importance of lexical aspects on acquisition of English present perfect. However, not a lot of researchers were conducted in Hong Kong.

My present study aims to examine the use of present perfect by second language learners in relation to first language influence and the inherent semantic aspectual property of verbs. It aims at addressing one main issue: whether advanced Cantonese learners of English are under L1 influence in their use of English present perfect. It is hypothesized that Cantonese aspectual marker –zo and the temporal adverbial ‘already’ would affect learners’ use of present perfect. In addition, it is anticipated that lexical semantics still plays a role on their usage as well. A translation task and a story narrative task are designed. The experiment has yield interesting findings. I hope that it could lead to more investigation and discussion on this currently under-explored topic.

Working on the capstone project is certainly a very enjoyable process. It could be tough at first and the schedule was really packed. Yet the hard work certainly paid off. Witnessing the completion of the project is extremely satisfying. I have learnt to be a more humble learner of English who is willing to take up challenges. When I tell people I am an English major, their immediate response would always be ‘Shakespeare?’. Yet for me, I am more interested in English Linguistics. Linguistics introduces you to a field of unconscious knowledge about language and unveils mysteries laid in human communication system. Through different courses, I have gained insights into many aspects of human language. It has sharpened my awareness towards various linguistics phenomena. More importantly, it reminds me to pay attention to every single detail in life and make insightful observations.