AN ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF HAVE BY ADULT LEARNERS IN AN OPEN DISTANCE LEARNING INSTITUTION
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Date
2014-06-11
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Conference On Professional Development In Education (PDE2014), Widyatama University Indonesia, Open University Indonesia and Open University Malaysia
Abstract
Declining mastery of the English language is a cause of great concern and consternation in Malaysia, particularly
in the education domain. OUM seeks to address issue of learners’ English language readiness by making four
basic level English based courses compulsory to all undergraduate students. This paper looks specifically at the
grammar of the language used by OUM learners in two of the courses mentioned above to ascertain their
mastery, or lack of it, of a specific grammatical construction, the Perfective HAVE in present perfect sentences
based on a corpus derived from their coursework. This paper analyses learners’ use of the perfective HAVE in
the present perfect tense a corpus of learner submitted assignment papers. This syntactical construction is
chosen because it is generally regarded by learners as one of the harder tenses to master. The findings will show
that while there are indeed issues the learners’ mastery of the said construction, they are not entirely unable to
use the construction.
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Keywords
Adult Learners, Open Distance Learning Institution