A Study Of Chinese Learners’ Use Of The Definite Article In Oral English From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The English article system is one of the most frequently used functionalwords, which consists of three kind of articles, i.e., the definite article the, theindefinite article a(n), and the zero article. They are of great importance inlanguage communication and have been studied in second language acquisitionresearches for several decades. The frequency of article use is extremely high,and misuse of articles will influence the quality of communication. Especiallyfor Chinese learners whose first language do not have an article system,learning and use of English articles will be more difficult. The English articlesystem is hard to teach and learn, and it is difficult to master the use of articlescompletely (Thomas,1989). Although various errors might appear in the use ofarticles, EFL learners have not paid enough attention to it, especially in oralcommunication. Therefore it is necessary to research articles from a newperspective and through new theories. Relevance Theory belongs to cognitivepragmatics and is different from traditional grammars, which fit people’sthinking process better. So it is more reasonable to research articles underrelevance theoretical framework.Scholars both overseas and domestic (e.g., Zegarac,2004; Zhao,2006; Xie,2007) explored English articles from the perspective of Relevance Theory.However, their researches are either lack the support of empirical results orunreasonable in research methods and materials. Also, previous researches areall focused on written language. So on the basis of these researches, the presentresearch explored how Chinese EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners usethe definite article in oral English from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Research questions are:1) What is the situation of Chinese English majorcollege students’ use of definite article in spoken English?2) How doesRelevance Theory explain the use of definite article in corpus?3) How couldRelevance Theory help in learning and teaching English definite article?Data analyzed in this thesis are taken from a small corpus in the SpokenEnglish Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL) designed especially for articleresearches tagged by Dr. Zhu Yeqiu in Nanjing University.60texts are included.SECCL is built on the transcripts of the second year English majors’ recordingin the national Spoken English Test for English Majors (Band4)(SETEM-4).SETEM-4contains three kinds of tasks: story retelling, monologue anddialogue. The first two are main tasks analyzed in the present study. Zhu&Wen(2008a,2008b,2008c) investigated Chinese EFL learners’ oral use of articleswith the help of this small corpus. They aimed at enhancing the understandingof Chinese EFL learners’ use of articles, and the effects of various factors onvariation in article accuracy. Their results are based on error analysis of data incorpus, but different from the present research their analysis did not includeerrors in idioms.Statistical results got from the present research is a little different comparedwith the results got from previous researches focus on written language.According to the statistic data, participants in the present research couldcorrectly use articles in their oral English (88.9%), but there are still errors intheir usage. Analysis of the errors they made is discussed by their types. Thereare mainly omission errors, overuse errors, and misuse errors, each have theircharacters and strategies. The results supported Zegarac’s hypothesis andfurther probes this problem with real utterances, discussing typical errors, idiomerrors and the slips of the tongue separately in each type of article errors. In themisuse error, the present research has found samples of misuse of a for thewhich have not been discussed before. To avoid this kind of error, studentsshould make clear whether the noun phrase to be used is relevant enough in thecontext. Compared with previous researches which are based on written tasks, the present research is based on oral language. One cannot spend as much timein monitoring and revising their product in speaking as what they do in writing.Therefore, speaking can be more challenging than writing for EFL learners.Finally, on the basis of literature review and data analysis in this study, theauthor put forward a guideline of relevance theoretical use of the definite article.Employing the relevance theoretical framework to guide the use of definitearticle is fairly a good choice in second language teaching and learning. TheRelevance Theory provides a contextual meaning of articles which is not a ruleto be recited but guidance for the use of articles according to the contextualenvironment at the moment. Analyzing the use of definite articles in oralEnglish of Chinese students is helpful to correct these errors. It also offersChinese EFL learners’ data and research results of article use to the field ofarticle researches. And the corpus seems to be a promising method for this kindof studies.