English Grammar Proficiency Predictability in the Prospect of Present Simple and Present Continuous Tenses: A Case from China

English proficiency refers to fluency of the language usage. It maintains four skills application, as well as sentence structures, and parts of speech. Morpheme is the smallest unit of a word, whereas verbs and nouns are the first two important parts of speech. They share some forms of words that could make the fluency better. Known as verbs, present simple tense is the foundation of grammar learning, and the continuous tense is the other. In this study, present simple tense and present continuous tense were taken as a tool to predict English grammar proficiency and a predictable exam was developed. As a result, the developed ۶۷-item Tense Test is highly correlated with GPT and has significant differences in predicting English grammar proficiency as a whole. Suggestions are focusing more on the two crucial grammar tenses in English class in practice and introducing more pedagogical teaching materials into classroom on the distinguishments between the two grammar tenses and the others. The implications, limitations, and future research plans are presented in this paper.

Keywords:

English grammar , verb tense , GPT , grammar proficiency