An Investigation Of Misusage Of English Articles By Senior High School Students

English articles include definite article the, indefinite article a/an and zero article ?. They belong to a category of functional words that are traditionally neglected. Due to their complexity and difficulty, articles aren’t easy to be fully acquired, even for those whose native language is English, let alone the Chinese students, for whom there is no article system in their native language at all.Much research has been done in the field of English articles from different perspectives, but few studies on learners whose first language is Chinese. The samples or subjects are in college students who major in English or not, as far as the author concerned, there is very little research on senior high school learners.This paper, based on Bickerton’s(1981) and Huebner’s(1983) semantic classification, sets out to investigate the misusege of English article by 70 senior high school students using a test instrument. Based on the investigation the author proposes some pedagogical suggestions. It hoped that the results of the study can help Chinese English teachers gain a better understanding of senior high school students’ English articles misusage and shed some new light on how to teach article system in the future.The major findings of this thesis are reported in the following:1. The accuracy order of three articles proved in this study is: the>a/an> ?.2. Among the three categories of article errors, confusion of article errors occurs most frequently, and then addition of article, the omission rank the last. It shows that students have difficult in choosing the right articles between a/an and the. The subjects also have a tendency in overusing the and a/an in the present study.3. In terms of accuracy order of five semantic types, the accuracy order of 5types is type 2 > type 4 > type 5 > type 1 > type 3. The study of the performance by all the subjects indicate that they perform best in [+SR, +HK] context and [-SR,-HK]both, then [conventional usage]. And they have the greatest trouble in [+SR,-HK]context, then in [-SR, +HK] context.4. Countability of NPs is another influencing factor to correctly choose articles,and we find that students have the tendency to use definite article to mark with plural countable nouns. When these students are asked how to distinguish singular countable NPs from uncountable NPs, they seem to have difficulty to make a distinction between them.At last, based on the analysis of articles errors, this paper proposes some suggestions and solutions to the teaching of articles: starting with teaching the use of the might make students easier to acquire English article system; letting the students know the exact contexts in which these rules are applied is necessary; English teachers should use authentic language data while teaching the English articles;bringing in the concept of specific and definite while teaching the articles may be good for the learners.