A Corpus-based Study On The Acquisition Of The English Articles

The present research focuses its attention on the acquisition of the English articles by Chinese learners in junior middle school as well as in college and university. The learner corpus employed is CLEC, a million-word corpus with five sub-corpora representing learners of senior high school, intermediate and advanced non-English major as well as intermediate and advanced English major. The controlled corpus for comparison is adapted LOCNESS (sub-LOCNESS), a sub-corpus of the ICLE compiled for comparisons with learner corpora. And the retrieval software is AntConc3.2.0.beta2, which is a powerful and user-friendly concordance tool.The methodological procedure is carried out in the following steps: (1) adapt the NS corpus LOCNESS to make it comparable to St2, St5 and St6 in capacity as well as the ages of the sample resources; (2) concordance the frequencies of the, a and an in St2, St5, St6 and sub-LOCNESS, and compute their percentages and standard frequencies; (3) categorize and annotate the article misuses in St2, St5 and St6; (4) concordance the absence, redundancy and confusion of the, a and an in St2, St5 and St6, and compute the percentages and standard frequencies; (5) compare and analyze the overall frequencies of articles in St2, St5, St6 and sub-LOCNESS; (6) compare and analyze the misuses of articles in St2, St5 and St6; (7) analyze and discuss the correlation between Chinese learners' article acquisition and their proficiency level from the viewpoints of overall frequency and misusage; and (8) analyze and discuss the contexts for the misuses of the definite the.After the categorization, annotation, concordancing, analyses and discussions, we finally arrived at the following major findings: (1) Chinese learners tend to underuse articles in general, while advanced and intermediate-advanced learners overuse the indefinite a; (2) of the three categories of article misusage, the absence of articles are the most frequent, up to 61%, after which comes the redundancy and confusion of articles. The absence of articles are mainly due to interlingual interference, while the redundancy and confusion of articles a result of intralingual influence; (3) there is a correlation between Chinese learners' acquisition of articles and their proficiency levels. On the one hand, Chinese learners' overall frequency of articles approaches that of the native speakers with the advance of their proficiency level. On the other, the learners' article misuses on the whole diminish from St2 to St6; and (4) the definite the is the mostvulnerable article to be absent or redundant in Chinese learners' writings, and the contexts for the misusage of the articles are various. Ten categories are identified in the absence of the, eleven in the redundancy category and nine in that of the confusion.And five implications are generated from the findings: (1) the uses of articles are to be instructed according to the characteristics of the articles as well as the learners; (2) the instruction of article rules is to be conducted with examples and contexts as well as exercises, while for the exceptions and those in phrases, rote learning is called for; (3) regularly misused articles should be tackled according to the causes of the misusage; (4) article instruction is to be integrated with the learners' overall linguistic knowledge; and (5) article acquisition should be treated as part of the IL development. And teachers should hold a tolerant attitude toward the learners' misuses of articles.