English-Thai time expressions used by Thai efl learners

Abstract

This study explored Thai EFL learners' usage of English and Thai time expressions. The participants were 40 Thai EFL university learners, including 10 freshmen and 10 seniors from the Thai program, and 10 freshmen, and 10 seniors from the English program. All participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire with English-tense identification, translation, and fill in the blank with verbs in appropriate forms. The results revealed that the majority of the Thai EFL learners (85%) used Thai time expressions accurately. As for the English, over half of the learners had difficulties in using English time expressions although most of them could identify the grammatical structure, especially the perfect, progressive, and perfect progressive tenses. Furthermore, the results indicated that motivation affected the learners' usage of English time expressions in some groups while emotion influenced the usage of time expressions of all groups. Moreover, the duration of their English language exposure shaped all learners' use of time expressions.;