A Studyof The Acquisition Of English Articles By Senior Middle School Students In Chinese Mainland

In the field of second language (L2) teaching and learning, English articles are generally considered difficult, and thus article acquisition has been a hot research issue. Existing research outside China has mostly focused on ESL or EFL learners’use of articles with few native speakers of Chinese as participants. Studies in China have mostly focused on college students’acquisition of English articles, rarely using high school students as participants. This thesis aims to fill in the research gap by investigating senior high school students’acquisition of articles, following Ionin, Ko&Wexler (2004)’s Article Choice Parameter theory. According to this theoretical framework, article selection is defined by the two sets of parameter values, namely [±definiteness] and [±specificity]. This thesis analyzed high school students’production of articles in their compositions and in fill-in-blanks tests, identified the error patterns, and provided suggestions to better teach high school students to acquire English articles, particularly the uniqueness usage (i.e.,[+definiteness,+specificity]).The present study addressed three research questions:(1) Do high school students acquire articles well enough? If not, what are the error patterns?(2) What are underlying reasons for the error patterns?(3) Regarding the non-generic, uniqueness usage of article as defined by [+definiteness,+specificity], can high school students correctly use definite articles in the four contexts, namely, the textual, situational, structural, and cultural uses?To answer these questions, two empirical studies were designed, using English composition and fill-in-blanks tests, respectively. In Study1,331in-class essays or exam papers were collected from225students of two high schools in Fuzhou. Erroneous use of articles was found in172sentences, and then analyzed. The results show that high school students generally have a poor command of articles. The dominant error type is article omission. Definite articles, particularly regarding the textual and cultural uses of definite articles, are the major source of difficulty.Prior to the formal test, Study2first examined70test items concerning the usage of articles in the College Entrance Examinations from14provinces or municipal governments in recent8years. The analyses show that definite articles and the uniqueness usage of definite articles are the key testing points. Based on these findings, fill-in-blanks tests were designed to test high school students’command of the uniqueness usage in the non-generic use of definite articles. Experimental items were constructed in four conditions, all testing the uniqueness usage of the definite article’the’, that is, discourse use, situational use, structural use and cultural use, each consisting of12items. Forty-eight target items and48filler items were counterbalanced by a Latin Square design, and were then pseudo-randomized, resulting in four lists. Two groups of senior high school students, totaling96, participated in the test, one being high-proficiency and the other, low-proficiency. The results show that both groups did not fully acquire the use of definite articles, although the high-proficiency group performed significantly better than the low-proficiency group. Both groups showed a similar acquisition pattern, that is, the correct rate of the situational use was significantly better than that of the discourse and cultural uses, but was only marginally better than the structural use. Possible reasons for the error pattern are discussed, specifically, countability of nouns, semantic features of nouns and learners’background knowledge.Taken together, the results of the two empirical studies suggest that negative transfer from LI, misanalyses of the countability of noun phrases and inadequate exposure to the target usage in L2lead to an overall lack of awareness of using articles and inadequate use of articles. To help raise students’awareness of article usage, and to teach more efficiently, suggestions are offered in the end. It is recommended that high school teachers i) contrast the conceptual differences in definiteness and specificity between Chinese and English; ii) proceed from uniqueness as defined by [+definiteness,+specificity], thoroughly explaining the four uses of the definite articles.