The Role Of Contextual Factor ESK In Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of The English Article System

The English article system comprises the definite article the, the indefinite article a/an and the null (or "zero") articleφ. They modify the noun phrase (NP), representing the semantic meaning of definiteness, specificity etc., to develop the complex semantic concepts, the unique syntactic functions and the complicated matching relations between form and meaning. In the field of applied linguistics, the English article is the acknowledged teaching difficulty and receives lots of attention in second language acquisition (SLA). Recent years has witnessed many systematic studies and new theories or hypothesis dealing with L2ers' acquisition of English articles, such as the Fluctuation Hypothesis(FH) adopted by Ionin et al (2004), the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis(PTH)accepted by Goad&White(2004) and the Syntactic Misanalysis Account(SMA)supported by Trenkic(2007,2008).Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004) attested the FH:L2ers have full and direct access to the universal semantic features [+definite] and [+specific], but do not know which of these features underlies article choice in English. As a result, they fluctuate between dividing English articles on the basis of definiteness and on the basis of specificity until the sufficient input leads them to choose English articles according to the [±definite] feature.This paper, based on the Syntactic Misanalysis Account, on which L2 articles are treated as adjectives by L2ers (Trenkic,2007), proposes that the English article is the functional category with null semantic meaning and its production is syntactic-driven. Trenkic(2008) suspects that Ionin et al.'s(2004) results conflated two unrelated factors: the speaker's explicit statement of his familiarity with the person or object being talked about (i.e. the explicitly stated knowledge(ESK)) and the speaker's intention to refer(i.e. specificity). Introducing the new contextual variable[±ESK] (the explicitly stated or denied knowledge of the entity in question), the present study holds that the L2ers' article choice is not affected by the Article Choice Parameter (ACP):[±Specific], but by the analysis and assessment of the context in which the NP lies as well as the extra-linguistic factor ESK.To probe whether in the forced choice elicitation task of Ionin et al. (2004) the L2ers fluctuate in article choices due to the access to the two settings of ACP or due to the ESK about the entity being talked about, this study, the Trenkic's(2008) replication research, conducted the English Proficiency Test and the Forced Choice Elicitation Task with 41 freshmen,41 sophomores and 41 juniors of English majors in XUST. The language proficiency test categorized the subjects into three groups:46 advanced,43 upper intermediate and 34 intermediate.The hypothesis that L2er's article choice is influenced by the stated/denied familiarity/acquaintance with the "identifying attributes" of the entity being talked about makes predictions as follows:1. In the context types from 1 to 3, the L2ers make right use of a and wrong use of the and the details are:Type 1:[-Definite,+Specific,+ESK] the highest rate of misuse of theType 2:[-Definite,-Specific,-ESK] the highest rate of accurate use of a and the lowest rate of misuse of theType 3:[-Definite,+Specific,-ESK] difficulty is between that of Type 1 andType22. In the context types from 4 to 6, the L2ers make right use of the and wrong use of a and the details are:Type 4:[+Definite,+Specific,+ESK] the highest rate of accurate use of the and the lowest rate of misuse of aType 5:[+Definite,-Specific,-ESK] the highest rate of misuse of aType 6:[+Definite,+Specific,-ESK] difficulty is between that of Type 4 andType 5The results indicate that the above predictions were well supported by L2ers from all groups of participants. Furthermore, Univariate Tests found no difference among the three groups in each context type. Only marginal difference was found between the advanced and intermediate group in [+definite;+specific;-ESK] contexts (p=.096). Univariate tests found significant effect for the overuse of zero article in [-definite;-specific;-ESK]contexts (F(2,120)=4.612, p=.012), and multiple comparisons only found significant difference between the two lower groups(i.e. the upper intermediate and the intermediate) of students (p=.014).The theoretical significance of the present study lies in the fact that the English articles may be misinterpreted as adjectives in L2 grammar by L2ers from article-less L1 and validates the Syntactic Misanalysis Account in L2er's English article choice. Pedagogically speaking, this study deepens our understanding of the nature of English articles and exerts far-reaching influence on L2ers' English article acquisition from L1 Chinese background.