Reference to past
Jürgen Meisel (1987) observed the developing ability to use language in events time. He found the learners from different first language backgrounds and acquiring a variety of second language, acquire the language for referring to parts events in a similar pattern.
In young children,learner with limited language that refer to events in the order which they occurred a time or place to show that event occurred in the past. For example, My son come. He work in restaurant.
After that, learners start to add a grammatical morpheme, which shows that the verb is marked for the past. They used past tense forms of irregular verb. For example, Wewent to school every day. And then, they begin making past tense on regular verbs by add -ed in ending word but learners may still make errors such as add -ed ending of the wrong past tense form. For example, the present perfect rather than the simple past.My sister catched a big fish. , She has lived here since fifteen years.
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (2000) found learners are more likely to mark past tense on some verbs that is activities verbs than on others that is state verbs.
For example, learners seem to mark past tense more easily in the sentences “I broke the vase” and “He fixed the car.” than in the sentences “She seemed happy last week” or “My father belonged to a club.
Laura Collins (2002) research the different English verb forms used by French speakers. She found French speakers usually used the past tense in spoken French but this form similar the present perfect tense in English.For example, “Yesterday he ate an apple” in English. French use “Hieril a mangéunepomme” that mean “Yesterday he has eaten an apple”.In Collin’s study, learner completed advancement by adding in space with the proper form of a verb. In place where English speakers would have used the simple past tense while French speakers did sometime use the perfect forms that either present perfect or past perfect. Collins observes, “The first language influence does not appear to override the effect of lexical aspect; rather it occurs within it”.