Saudi EFL Learners’ Use of Alternative Forms to the English Past Tense: An Aspectual Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the alternative forms to simple past produced by Saudi learners of English across different proficiency levels, with a particular focus on the lexical aspect. Based on the analysis of 62 Saudi EFL learners’ responses to a cloze test, findings showed that learners’ alternative patterns were of six types: base and present, progressive, aux+ present/past, perfect, blank and other forms. The main competing patterns to simple past were the base and present, progressive and aux + present/past forms. The lexical aspect appeared to have a partial influence on the production of the alternative patterns in the past context, whereby progressive was highly used with activity, which is consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis, but it was also overused with states, which is not in line with the Aspect Hypothesis. Evidence of the learners’ L1 influence was displayed in their inaccurate use of progressive with states, overuse of base/present forms and their low frequency of the perfect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".