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영어

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how exactly learners are aware of English tense-aspect and to emphasize the importance of teaching tense and aspect focusing on their meaning differences. Even though it is impossible to understand English without a clear notion of tense and aspect and subtle differences sometimes play a pivotal role in communication, those differences have not been considered significant until now. In order for students to clearly distinguish the relative differences in various tense-aspect features, it is probably a good way to make students exposed to as many contrasting examples as possible. For this study, twenty seven university students participated and they are divided into three groups according to their TOEIC score. They are given 14 contrasting sentences showing meaning differences between various tense and aspect features and they are told to translate those sentences into Korean or write down any differences they recognize between the contrasting sentences. The result shows that most students do not have clear notion about English tense-aspect regardless of their TOEIC score. Also, it reveals that they have difficulty distinguishing some specific differences; strong continuation versus possible continuation between present perfect and present perfect progressive, indefinite query versus definite query between simple past and present perfect, no room for change versus room for change between simple past and past progressive.