of Spoken and Written English in a Vietnamese

A study of one of the most recurrent and persistent obstacles ir learning English as a second language, the use of tense marking, is presented. The analysis is based on audio recordings from a Vietnamese community in Northern Virginia, representing four cage ranges from 10 to 55 years, two lengths of U.S. residency (1-3 years and 4-7 years), and both males and females. A range of possible effects on variable tense marking patterns is considered, including surface form distinctions such as regular and irregular forms, phonological shape of those forms, the linguistic context of the forms, lexical items, and relative frequency of the forms. Higher order effects such as foregrounding, episodic boundaries, and tense continuity within narratives are also considered in both spoken and written language. The analysis reveals that surface-level constraints are more significant than the higher-order constraints, and tha