A Longitudinal Study On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of The English Article System

Articles are the most frequently used words in English discourse. However, the acquisition of the highly complex article system is also one of the biggest challenges for an ESL/EFL learner. Few English teachers could devise a scheme to teach English articles effectively. A sharp contrast and differences between Chinese and English on the article use and the way to express definiteness lead to the acquisition problems.In order to examine the acquisition of English articles, a combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal method has been used on the basis of 85 compositions written by students at different language proficiency levels in the Chinese setting. One essay, written under similar and controlled conditions, has been collected from each student ranging from junior high school, senior high school to college English majors over a period of six to eight days. The use, misuse and omissions of English articles have been examined through a detailed analysis with the help of two adult native speakers from the United States.Results of the study indicate some similarities and differences in the English article acquisition by the three groups, in relation to the frequency of article use, the success rate in sentence-level use (structural) and discourse-level use (textual) of definite article, types of errors and the acquisition sequence.At the level of junior high school, the students have behaved quite differently. Some have applied more than 20 articles in a paper of less than 200 words while some...