A Study Of Indefinite Article A(n) In High School Students' Writing And Teaching Strategies

According to Master,English article appears frequently,and it is important to the textual connection.English article system primarily can be divided into three types:definite article the,indefinite article a/an and zero article 0(Master 2003,2012).Peter Master proposes a Binary System of English article and divides the English articles into Classification(a/an and 01)and Identification(the and 02).Thus,based on the Binary System of English article,the author takes Chinese senior high school students as research object and tries to investigate the various using features of indefinite article a(n)during English learning process with native speakers as reference.To be specific,the three research questions are as follows:(i)Compared with native speakers,what's the distribution feature of indefinite article a(n)in terms of colligation in the writings by Chinese senior high school learners?(ii)Compared with native speakers,what are the specific functions of indefinite article a(n)in the writings by Chinese senior high school learners?(iii)What teaching strategies of indefinite article a(n)can be developed for Chinese senior high school learners?In this study,the author uses Corpus-based approach.The major findings of this research are as follows:(i)The indefinite articles used by Chinese senior high school students are characterized by the unique characteristics in the colligation distribution.They tend to use the first type of colligation "A(n)+ PRE-MOD + N",in which they overuse the colligation of "A(n)+ N" and"A(n)+C-ADJ+N".(ii)The indefinite articles used by Chinese senior high school students are characterized by the unique characteristics in function.They tend to use the colligation "A(n)+N" to achieve the function of "Count/Noncount" and will only use indefinite article to realize the function of"Partitive".In addition,they seldom use the structure to express the function of"Defining relative clause".(iii)The teaching strategies of indefinite article are divided into two dimensions:(a)Teaching colligation of indefinite article a(n).(b)Teaching function of indefinite article a(n).The possible causes of such differences between Chinese learners and native English speakers can be divided into two parts:(i)mother language transfer(LI transfer);(ii)Grammar teaching.The findings of this study enlightenment on English teaching and learning.Teachers should not simply use the articles but rather clarify the correspondence between colligations and functions.Teachers and students pay attention to reduce the negative impact of mother tongue on English learning.