Page 171 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 157
On the whole, the teaching of verb tenses and aspects in L2 aca- demic writing needs to focus first on the meanings and uses of the simple present. In instruction the meanings and uses of the simple past represent the next order of priority, followed possibly by the present perfect tense. Based on the frequencies of occurrences in for- mal academic writing, the teaching of other verb tenses and aspects may be of reduced value compared with the top three tenses.
TYPICAL PROBLEMSWITH THE USES OF TENSES AND ASPECTS
Inconsistent Contextual Uses of Tenses
In written text in English, the tense system provides an important means of textual cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Matthiessen, 1996; see also chap. 11). Inconsistent uses of tenses (aka "jumping" tenses) represent highly common types of errors in L2 academic writing. Fortunately, it is rel- atively easy to teach students to avoid and correct them.
The uses of tenses in academic writing are highly conventional- ized, and their uses do not necessarily reflect objective reality. For this reason the conventional uses of the "academic" present tense often appear untruthful and incorrect to L2 writers.
In L2 academic writing, tenses are often employed inconsistently be- cause of NNS students' logical analyses of the organization of events along the time continuum.
Errors with inconsistent uses of tenses are so prevalent in L2 stu- dents' academic writing that in the long run it may be helpful and ef- fective to address them in classroom teaching to provide L2 writers a means of correcting or preventing such errors in their own writing.
Some of the most common and logical reasons for writers' errors can in- clude the following:
• Past-tense verbs may be used refer to activities that took place prior to those denoted by present-tense verbs (e.g., *last quarter, the student studied hard, and hegets_good grades). Thus, in those cases when L2 writers feel the need to highlight the sequence of activi- ties and mark an action that precedes another, the past tense seems to be a logical choice to indicate to the reader that one ac- tion took place before another.
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