• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.177-191
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• 2011

This paper examines nursing professionals' English abstract to learn their preferences towards tense and voice choices. A total of 24 abstracts, completed reviews to be published by the editorial board members of the Korea Industrial Nursing Association, were analyzed for the study. Each sentence in the four parts of the abstract (Purpose, Methods, Results, and Conclusion) was examined and classified into active/passive voices, and present/past/present perfect tenses. Verbs were then further identified to see which ones were commonly preferred to state the objectives of the study, methods, and to draw conclusions. Hedging expressions in Conclusion were also examined. The results of the present study revealed that Purpose was mostly (79%) stated in the past tense with slight use (17%) of the present tense in the form of 58% active and 42% passive voice whereas Methods were dominantly (96%) illustrated in the past tense with preference of mixed active and passive voice. The Results were also preferably (92%) stated in past tense and Conclusion in both present and past tense. Verbs used by these nursing professionals seemed diverse; however, hedging appeared to be narrowly limited to a few expressions including suggest and should. More diverse English hedging expressions need to be taught at least college level writing so that the EFL learners and writers can have a better understanding of presenting statements in an appropriate level of caution, confidence, or uncertainty.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.55-67
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• 2001

Commercial machine translation systems have been announcing recently, However, there are problems that the systems have shown mistranslations, yet. Among these mistranslations, this paper is interested in the mistakes of tense processing. The paper compares Korean tenses with 12 English ones: present. past, future, present perfect. past perfect, future perfect. present progressive, past progressive, future progressive, present perfect progressive, past perfect progressive. future perfect progressive. Next, we perform the meaning analysis of Korean tenses. Then we describe the structure of the tenses based on Conceptual Graph(CG). In the experiment. the paper implements the program that translates sentences included in the tenses into CG.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.133-156
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• 2007

Although the understanding of English tense system is a crucial factor for communicative English learning and teaching for EFL students, it has been neglected over the years. As with other areas of the grammar, difficulties may arise from the nature of the system itself or from differences between time, tense and aspect. Consequently, many learners face a considerable difficulty with the English tense system as they are more often unable to grasp the basic conceptual differences of present/present continuous, past/present perfect, will/be going to along with many others. More concerning fact is that lots of instructors or so-called native English teachers seem not to be aware of the importance of teaching English tense system. The purpose of this study is to review and examine various theories and practical usages of tense in order to establish and/or present better methods for teaching tenses. This paper is focused on comparatively exact distinction of time, physical notion from tense, grammatical category as well as sequences of tenses in view of school grammar and communicative function. At the end or middle of each chapter, efficient teaching and learning techniques or strategies on tenses are suggested to help instructors or learners who relentlessly face confusions in understanding tense and its usage for communicative English learning and teaching. This study attempts to influence learners' ability to recognize and write tense in authentic contexts not to mention spoken English.

• Language and Information
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.103-117
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• 2015

Not fully satisfied with the treatment of the so-called two nows in Korean by Lee & Choi (2009), this article seeks to furnish the issue with a firmer ground to base on in the relevant conversation. A close comparison between now and cikum appearing in the present perfect and present tense results in the two findings that (i) a crucial difference between the two adverbs is that Korean cikum lacks English now's ability to be identified with the reference time and (ii) further, seeming differences between them are not real but in fact due to tense and aspectual discrepancies between English and Korean. Thus, it claims, contra Lee (1976) and Park (2004), that cikum is a temporal locating adverb which invariably locates the event time of a given eventuality at the utterance time. In particular, it motivates that a past-tensed sentence with cikum should be understood as holding in the recent past mainly from pragmatic inferences rather than semantic entailments.