Future-time reference in spoken EFL

Abstract Previous research has given much attention to how native speakers of English and, to a lesser extent, speakers of World Englishes, choose between will and be going to to talk about the future. There is, however, a lack of research investigating how learners of English as a Foreign Language choose between these future markers at different proficiency levels. We collected 3,616 instances of will and be going to from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, which consists of spoken language from low-intermediate to advanced learners of English from various mother tongue backgrounds. These future marker observations were annotated for constraints known to probabilistically influence the choice of variant and then analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression. Results show that learners are sensitive to more constraints than native speakers, suggesting that the forms serve more distinct functions. As learners become more proficient, they consider fewer constraints and thereby better approximate native speakers.