www.sciedu.ca/wjel World Journal of English Language Vol. 3, No. 3; 2013 Numerical/Visual Elaboration of the Temporal Distance in Teaching Tense-Aspect Distinctions in English Buğra Zengin1, * 1Department of English Language and Literature, Namık Kemal University, Turkey *Correspondence: Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Namık Kemal University, Namık Kemal Mahallesi, Kampüs Caddesi, Tekirdağ, Turkey Tel: 90-282-250-0000. E-mail:
[email protected] Received: June 26, 2013 Accepted: July 17, 2013 Online Published: August 2, 2013 doi:10.5430/wjel.v3n3p1 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v3n3p1 Abstract Teaching the English tense-aspect system is a challenging problematic area in that its acquisition is a major source of error for English L2 learners at all levels, which signals the need for a central focus on establishing form-meaning connections. A wise strategy would be the application of deliberate simplification of the linguistic material only to rectify it at later stages. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the ways to benefit from the distance as a metaphorical link between the past and present for its facilitation effect on learning the present, past and present perfect tenses. The distance was elaborated numerically and visually but the elaboration was kept to be minimum. The links were created between the visual and numerical cues and the target forms through shared partial similarities to help associate the temporal meanings with the auxiliary forms of 'be' and 'do', and the inflection markers of '-ed' and -s. In a nonequivalent comparison-group design, ANCOVA and Kruskas-Wallis revealed the experimental group's significantly better performance in tense-aspect distinctions as regards temporal meanings.