LEARNING SUPPORT FOR TENSE SELECTION OF ENGLISH

COMPOSITION BY ASKING BACK QUESTIONS

Hiroki Hidaka, Yasuhiko Watanabe, Kenji Umemoto, Yuusuke Taniguchi and Yoshihiro Okada

Ryukoku University, Dep. of Media Informatics, Seta, Otsu, Shiga, Japan

eywords:

Learning Support for English Composition, Asking Back Question, Past Tense, Present Perfect Tense.

Abstract:

There are several differences between Japanese and English expressions, such as the usage of tenses. Japanese

speakers generally use the past tense in Japanese sentences whether the past actions or events have some

connection with the presents. Because of the usage of the past tense in Japanese, Japanese speakers often

mistakenly use the past tense in English sentences when they should use the present perfect tense. In order to

select suitable tenses in English sentences, Japanese speakers should pay attention to the presence of connec-

tion between the past and the present because they are not described clearly in Japanese sentences. To solve

this problem, in this paper, we propose a learning support method for English composition by using asking

back questions. Our system asks users back, make them pay attention to the presence of connection between

the past and the present, and help them to determine which tense is suitable, the past tense or the present

perfect tense.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is difﬁcult for Japanese students to study English

writing because there are several differences between

Japanese and English expressions. For example,

Japanese speakers treat tenses differently from En-

glish speakers. Take the past tense and the present

perfect tense for example. In English, the past tense

and the present perfect tense are used to talk about the

past. The past tense is used to talk about past actions

and events.

(ex 1) I told him yesterday.

In (ex 1), the speaker uses the past tense of tell, told,

and intends to show the action is the past action. On

the other hand, the present perfect tense is used to

show that past actions or events have some connec-

tion with the present.

(ex 2) I have already told him.

In (ex 2), the speaker uses the present perfect tense

of tell, have told, and intends to show the action has

some connection with the present. As shown, in En-

glish, it is necessary to show clearly whether past ac-

tions or eventshavesome connection with the present.

On the other hand, in Japanese, it is not necessary to

show clearly whether past actions or eventshavesome

connection with the present. For example,

Figure 1: The translation process of Japanese sentences

about the past into English: 1. judgement about the pres-

ence of connection between the past and the present, 2.

translation.

(ex 3) kinou (yesterday), kare ni (him) hanashita

(told).

(ex 4) mou (already) kare ni (him) hanashita (told).

(ex 3) and (ex 4) should be translated as (ex 1) and

(ex 2), respectively. However, in both (ex 3) and (ex

4), the Japanese speakers use hanashita (told), which

is the past tense of hanasu (tell). As shown, Japanese

speakers generally use the past tense in Japanese sen-

tences whether the past actions or events have some

connection with the presents. Because of the usage

of the past tense in Japanese, Japanese students of-

ten mistakenly use the past tense in English sentences

170

Hidaka H., Watanabe Y., Umemoto K., Taniguchi Y. and Okada Y..

LEARNING SUPPORT FOR TENSE SELECTION OF ENGLISH COMPOSITION BY ASKING BACK QUESTIONS.

DOI: 10.5220/0003918601700174

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 170-174

ISBN: 978-989-8565-06-8

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Figure 2: System overview.

when they should use the present perfect tense. In

order to select suitable tenses in English sentences,

Japanese students should pay attention to the presence

of connection between the past and the present be-

cause they are not described clearly in Japanese sen-

tences (Figure 1).

A considerable number of studies have been made

on English composition support by extracting En-

glish expressions from Web documents (Oshika 05)

(Takeda 94) (Yamamoto 99) (EDP 07). In these stud-

ies, however, little attention has been given to the dif-

ferences between Japanese and English expressions.

Suppose that a Japanese student wants to translate (ex

4), and then, (ex 1) and (ex 2) are given as the transla-

tion examples of (ex 4) to the student. If the user does

not know that the presence of connection between the

past and the present is the key to distinguish the past

tense and the present perfect tense, it is difﬁcult to

determine which example sentence is proper. As a re-

sult, it is important to make students pay attention to

the presence of connection between the past and the

present.

To solve this problem, we propose a learning sup-

port method for tense selection of English composi-

tion by asking back questions. Our system asks users

back, make them pay attention to the presence of con-

nection between the past and the present, and help

them to determine which tense is suitable, the past

tense or the present perfect tense.

2 ASKING BACK QUESTIONS

ABOUT CONNECTION

BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE

PRESENT

In this study, we deal with two types of tenses to talk

about the past.

past tense we use this tense to talk about the past:

short, quickly ﬁnished actions and happenings.

For example, this tense is used in (ex 1).

present perfect tense we use this tense to say that

something in the past is connected with the

present in some way. For example, this tense is

used in (ex 2).

As mentioned, because of the usage of the past tense

in Japanese, Japanese students often mistakenly use

the past tense in English sentences when they should

use the present perfect tense. The key to determining

which tense is suitable is to pay attention to the pres-

ence of connection between the past and the present.

To solve this problem, our system asks users back

and make them pay attention to the presence of con-

nection between the past and the present. Figure 2

shows the overview of our system. Our system ap-

plies morphological analysis(Kurohashi 05) to an in-

put sentence, extracts a predicate verb in the past tense

from it, generates two types of asking back questions

according to the rules in Figure 3, and gives them to

LEARNINGSUPPORTFORTENSESELECTIONOFENGLISHCOMPOSITIONBYASKINGBACKQUESTIONS

171

(a) Generation rules of asking back questions for the

past tense

(b) Generation rules of asking back questions for the

present perfect tense

Figure 3: Generation rules of asking back questions for the

past tense and present perfect tense

the user. As shown in Figure 3, asking back questions

consist of questions and time relation charts. Take (ex

5) for example.

(ex 5) sakuban (last night), kare ni (him) hanashita

(tell).

From (ex 5), our system extracts “hanashita (told)” as

a predicate verb in the past tense. Then, according to

the rules in Figure 3, our system generates two types

of asking back questions:

• asking back question for the past tense (Figure 4

(a))

• asking back question for the present perfect tense

(Figure 4 (b))

Then, the user answers the asking back questions

while he/she pays attention to the presence of con-

nection between the past and the present. According

to the answer, our system generates an explanation

and an example sentence. By using the explanation

and example sentence, the user can translate (ex 5)

into English. Figure 5 (a) shows the explanation and

example sentence which our system gives to the user

when he/she determines that there is no connection

between the past and the present. On the other hand,

(a) An example of asking back questions for the past

tense

(b) An example of asking back questions for the

present perfect tense

Figure 4: Examples of asking back questions for the past

tense and present perfect tense

Figure 5 (b) shows the explanation and example sen-

tence which our system gives to the user when he/she

determines that there is some connection between the

past and the present.

3 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

To evaluate our method, we examined whether eight

Japanese students could select suitable tenses for the

given sentences. In this experiments, we gave the fol-

lowing Japanese sentences to the students.

(problem 1) kinou (yesterday), kare ha (he) koko ni

(here) tsuita (arrived).

(problem 2) 2 jikan mae (two hours ago), sono hik-

ouki ha (the airplane) ririku shita (took off).

(problem 3) watashi ha (I) kagi wo (key) nakushita

(lost). dakara (as a result) ima (now) ie ni (home)

hairenai (cannot enter).

(problem 4) dareka ga (someone) watashi no (my)

credit card wo (credit card) nusunda (stole). dakara

(as a result), ima (now) nani mo (anything) kaenai

(cannot buy).

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Table 1: Experimental Results.

ﬁrst test second test

(no asking back questions) (asking back questions)

past tense present perfect tense past tense present perfect tense

(problem 1) 8 0 7 1

(problem 2) 8 0 7 1

(problem 3) 7 1 0 8

(problem 4) 7 1 1 7

explanation “predicate verb (past tense)” is the past

action or event. Please use the verb in the past

tense when you translate this sentence into En-

glish.

example kinou (yesterday), shukudai ga (homework)

owatta (ﬁnished).

I ﬁnished my homework yesterday.

(a) The explanation and example which our system gives to

the user when he/she determines that there is no connec-

tion between the past and the present.

explanation “predicate verb (past tense)” is the past

action or event which is connected with the

present in some way. Please use the verb in the

present perfect tense when you translate this sen-

tence into English. However, you do not use

the present perfect tense when the sentence in-

cludes adverbs of ﬁnishing time (like yesterday,

last week, in 1990, etc).

example mou (already) shukudai ha (homework)

owatta (ﬁnished).

I have already ﬁnished my homework.

(b) The explanation and example which our system gives to

the user when he/she determines that there is some con-

nection between the past and the present.

Figure 5: Examples of explanations and example sentences

generated according to user’s determination of the presence

of connection between the past and the present. In fact, ex-

planations are written in Japanese and “predicate verb (past

tense)” is replaced by a predicate verb (past tense) extracted

from an input sentence.

In (problem 1) and (problem 2), the suitable tenses

were past tenses. On the other hand, in (problem

3) and (problem 4), the suitable tenses were present

perfect tenses. In this experiment, we conducted two

tests. In the ﬁrst test, our system did not give asking

back questions to the students. We examined whether

the students could select suitable tenses without the

support of our system. In the second test, our sys-

tem gave asking back questions to the students. We

examined whether the students could select suitable

tenses by using asking back questions. Table 1 shows

the experimental results. In Table 1, underlined num-

bers show the numbers of students who select the suit-

able tense. As shown in Table 1, in the ﬁrst test,

the students mainly used past tenses. The result of

the ﬁrst test shows that Japanese speakers often mis-

takenly use the past tense in English sentences when

they should use the present perfect tense. On the other

hand, the result of the second test shows our method

is useful to help users to select suitable tenses in En-

glish sentences. However, two students mistakenly

determined that present perfect tenses were suitable

for (problem 1) and (problem 2) in the second test.

In the ﬁrst test, they correctly determined that past

tenses were suitable for (problem 1) and (problem 2).

We interviewedthese two students and found that they

did not know we do not use the present perfect tense

with adverbs of ﬁnished time. To reduce these fail-

ures, we are considering adding new explanation to

asking back questions: we do not use the present per-

fect tense with adverbs of ﬁnished time (yesterday,

two hours ago, etc.).

In order to talk about the past, we use six different

tenses in English sentences:

• past tense (I worked),

• past progressive tense (I was working),

• present perfect tense (I have worked),

• present perfect progressive tense (I have been

working),

• past perfect tense (I had worked), and

• past perfect progressive tense (I had been work-

ing).

In this study, we dealt with only two of them: the past

tense and the present perfect tense. We will examine

whether our asking back method is useful when other

kinds of tenses are suitable for the given sentences.

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LEARNINGSUPPORTFORTENSESELECTIONOFENGLISHCOMPOSITIONBYASKINGBACKQUESTIONS

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Takeda and Furugori: A Sample-Based System for Help-

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JSISE, Vol.16 No.1, (1999).

Electronic Dictionary Project: EIJIRO 3rd Edition, ALC,

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