Understanding Tense on Short Story

Tense is considered as the most difficult part of English lesson by most of young learners. Conceptual understanding of tense of English is poorly mastered by the students. As a simple indicator, they will commonly think that there are twelve or maybe sixteen tenses in English. This conceptual confusion leads to low performance to apply tense of English under the right circumstances.

            Unfortunately, this problem is not only faced by elementary or high school students, but also university students.  A research conducted by Jufrizal (2008) at English Department of FBSS State University of Padang shows that understanding tense and aspect is still considered as the main problem of English teaching and learning at university level. He stated that most students (90%) do not know the differences and interrelationship between tense and aspect in English, and 70% of the students got difficulties and faced problems in understanding and using the grammatical feature appropriately. The result also shows that 80% of students were in problem to understand and to use future continuous, future perfect continuous, past perfect continuous and past perfect future continuous tense. Meanwhile 60% to 70% of students got difficulties in understanding and using past future continuous and past perfect tenses.

This fact shows that the mastery of the concept of tense of English among university students is still poor. Therefore, teachers need to take an immediate action to overcome this matter. If this problem persists, it can be the real barrier for the students to master English grammatical concept well.  Deals with his findings, Jufrizal (2008) suggested three important steps to be taken to minimize the problems faced by Indonesian students in understanding tense and aspect of English, they are: to establish and to strengthen students’ awareness and linguistics competence on the nature of English grammar; teacher should explain the concept and give appropriate exercises concerning with  the difference and interrelationship between tense and aspect; and to provide the students with appropriate learning materials and reference books.

            Related to above recommendation, this paper is an attempt to incorporate short story in understanding tense of English for the young learners. A short story is believed to be a good alternative media in learning tense on two main reasons:  

Firstly, a short story provides the context in which a certain tense is used. Secondly a short story provides time indicators. The combination of context and time indicator represented by the chronological order in a shot story will be influencing circumstances that ease the young learners in understanding English tense.

           

Tense

The term “tense” derives via Old French from Latin translation of Greek word for ‘time’(Greek khronos, Latin tempus) (Lyons, 1968: 304). The category of tense has to do with time-relation, so that tenses are the different form which a verb assumes to indicate the time of the action or state(Curme, 1966: 55). Similar with definition above, Comrie(1985: 9) states that tense is grammaticalized expression in time. Further he argued that there are two respects in which our view of tense as grammaticalized location in time is not merely a definition.  In short,  through this definition we might examine grammatical categories across languages, to investigate whether in that language tense exist or not and there are heavy constraints that language imposes on the range of expression of location intime that can be grammaticalized. In addition to the previous author, Baker (1992: 98) suggests that tense is one of grammatical category that deals with time relation of its verb and time relations have to do with locating an event in time.

Sometimes we find difficulty to differ tense from time, because according to Comrie (1985: 7), the idea of locating situation in time is purely conceptual notion, and is such potentially independent of the range of distinction made in particular language. In order to avoid this ambiguity, it is important to keep the two concepts  time and tense strictly apart. This argument based on the work of Jespersen in his book entitled Essential of English Grammar, that time is common in all language accros the world, meanwhile, tense varies from language to language and becomes the linguistic expression of time-relation (Jespersen, 1933: 230).

Tense becomes the main grammatical features which makes a language may have capability to express particular meaning by means of certain construction (Jufrizal, 2008). Basically, languages can be grouped into tenseness and tenseless language. The first refers to languages that encode timing distinction by means of grammatical elements. Meanwhile, the later refers to those encode the timing of a designated event lexically (Cruse, in Jufrizal, 2008). 

English is considered as tenseness language, meanwhile Bahasa Indonesia can be categorized as tenseless language. In English, tense belongs to one of grammatical categories that indicates the time of the action or state through its verb. Meanwhile, Bahasa Indonesia does not have grammatical category of tense to locate an event in time. Therefore in Bahasa Indonesia time of the action is realized through the use of adverb of time (keterangan waktu).

Subject to definitions above, the writer argues that tense in English is a kind of formal marker, mainly in the form of inflection of verb, that has function to locate an action or staes in time. it is important to understand when does an action or state takes place from the moment of speaking or to place a situation in time. Meanwhile, in Bahasa Indonesia, such grammatical categories do not exist.

Consistent with Jespersen’s definiton that the term of time is common in all language (Jespersen, 1944: 230) the writer believes in fact that we can identify the presence of time in Bahasa Indonesia, but actually we could not find such grammatical category of tense. In English, we can distinct between he sings a song and he sang a song, because of the presence of tense category. Meanwhile in Bahasa Indonesia we can not do so. Because tense is not a universal feature of language, in fact tense itself is not found in all languages (Lyons, 1968: 3004-305). Further he suggests as follows:

The essential characteristics of the category of tense is that it relates the time of action, event or state of affair referred to in the sentence to the time of utterance (the time of utterance being ‘now’).

Tense is therefore a deictic category which is simultaneously a property of the sentence and the utterance. The writer then will discuss tense as deictic category.