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Article published In: Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 8:1 (2025) ► pp.89–118

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Future-time reference in spoken EFL

More complex than in ENL?

 | Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
 | Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
 | KU Leuven, Belgium
Published online: 17 October 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.00030.dub
Abstract
Previous research has given much attention to how native speakers of English and, to a lesser extent, speakers of World Englishes, choose between will and be going to to talk about the future. There is, however, a lack of research investigating how learners of English as a Foreign Language choose between these future markers at different proficiency levels. We collected 3,616 instances of will and be going to from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, which consists of spoken language from low-intermediate to advanced learners of English from various mother tongue backgrounds. These future marker observations were annotated for constraints known to probabilistically influence the choice of variant and then analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression. Results show that learners are sensitive to more constraints than native speakers, suggesting that the forms serve more distinct functions. As learners become more proficient, they consider fewer constraints and thereby better approximate native speakers.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1The corpus
    • 2.2Data collection
    • 2.3Data annotation
      • 2.3.1Sentence type
      • 2.3.2Negation
      • 2.3.3Clause type
      • 2.3.4Persistence
      • 2.3.5Temporal proximity
      • 2.3.6Temporal adverb
      • 2.3.7Verb type
      • 2.3.8Person and animacy
      • 2.3.9Clause length
    • 2.4Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Negation
    • 3.2Persistence
    • 3.3Temporal proximity
    • 3.4Temporal adverb
    • 3.5Verb type
    • 3.6Clause length
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Why do learners deviate from native speakers regarding these probabilistic constraints?
    • 4.2How and why do learners acquire constraints that are not part of native speakers’ probabilistic grammar?
    • 4.3Prescriptivism: An alternative explanation?
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Data availability statement
  • Note
  • References
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