A Research On The Misuse Of Articles In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

It is well known to us all that vocabulary is an indispensable part of English learning.Many Chinese scholars believe that the vocabulary is the most difficult part of learning English.The article is also an indispensable part of the vocabulary.Generally speaking,the article,as a functional word,will not appear alone,and it will be attached to other words.In addition,the article can be divided into three types:definite article“the”,indefinite article “an”,indefinite article “a”,and the zero article.This paper will study the misuse of articles by analyzing students’ compositions.In this paper,the author takes 126 students’ mid-term examination paper as a research study in Guang’an,Sichuan Province,and then the author also uses the textual analysis method to analyze the types of the misuse of articles in senior high school students’ compositions.Finally,the author draws a conclusion about this research.Besides,the author studies this research from the following three aspects: firstly,the author wants to identify the types of the misuse of articles.Secondly,by analyzing compositions,the author wants to know which types of errors will account for a high proportion and why? Thirdly,the author puts forward some advice about how to improve teachers’ teaching efficiency.After analyzing those compositions,the author has collected 126 samples,4 invalid samples are removed,and the remaining 122 valid samples are analyzed.Finally,the author finds that the total number of the misuse of articles are 116 times,the misuse of articles which precedes a noun are 74 times,accounting for 64% of the total number of the misuse of articles;the misuse of articles which precedes an adjective are 6 times,accounting for the total number of the misuse of articles;the misuse of articles which precedes an ordinal numeral are 5 times,accounting for 4% of the total number of the misuse of articles;the misuse of articleswhich precedes a surname is once,accounting for about 1% of the misuse of articles.It can be seen that the number of the misuse of articles which precedes a noun is the most highest.And then,the misuse of articles which precedes an adjective is the following one.And the misuse of articles which precedes a surname is the least.Next,according to the results of text analysis and the literature review,the author makes a corresponding questionnaire,and then conducts a questionnaire survey.Through the analysis of the questionnaire,it can be found that the reasons for the misuse of articles are as follows: firstly,students are not clear about the definition and function of articles,and do not know how to apply them into practice.Secondly,the students confuse the usage of the indefinite article” a” with the indefinite article “an”.Thirdly,the teachers teach articles separately.Fourthly,teachers and students ignore the writing process.Finally,the author puts forward some suggestions to teachers and students according to the reasons of the misuse of articles.