An Empirical Study On Chinese College Students’Acquisition Of English Articles

As function words, articles are generally overlooked by English learners who always pay more attention to content words. But in fact, they are not at all as trivial as many people have long believed them to be. The simplicity of the forms of articles masks the complexity of the rules for nativelike usage. The acquisition of articles remains a problematic issue for a large proportion of English learners whose mother tongue is Chinese.There is a remarkable growth abroad in the study of article acquisition, both theoretical and applied. By contrast, China is at the fledgling phrase in terms of article study. Currently, no clear consensus has been reached over the characteristics of English learners’article acquisition in Chinese environment. In an attempt to enrich present empirical studies at home, this research is undertaken with the aim of studying Chinese college students’acquisition of English articles in depth. It intends to assess students’command of English articles in an objective and authoritative way, so as to trace the sources of their difficulties and suggest remedial measures to improve their accuracy. From a pedagogical viewpoint, the study of students’article acquisition will provide an illuminating insight for English teachers who are searching for effective ways of teaching English articles.The study investigates article acquisition in the frame work of Huebner’s Semantic Wheel. According to the theory, article uses are divided into four types:[-SR+HK],[+SR+HK],[+SR-HK] and [-SR-HK].[±SR] is the abbreviation for [±Specific Referent], and [±K] is for [±Assumed Known to the Hearer]. As a supplement to Huebner’s four types of article use, another type,[Conventional Usage], was added in by a group of scholars.Motivated by previous studies of English articles, this study examines the acquisition of articles by Chinese college students from the following three aspects: the correlation between English proficiency and the acquisition of English articles, learners’acquisition of articles with different semantic features, the main causes for English learners’article choice.It is found that there is a strong, positive correlation between English proficiency and the acquisition of English articles. The more proficient the learner’s English is, the more accurate his/her article choice is.What is more, data analysis indicates that articles with different semantic features pose different levels of difficulty for learners with different English proficiency. For learners in the higher proficiency group, the accuracy order of articles is [+SR-HK]=[+SR+HK]>[-SR-HK]=[Conventional usage]>[-SR+HK]; for the lower proficiency group, the order is [+SR+HK]=[+SR-HK]=[-SR-HK]>[Conventional usage]>[-SR+HK]. Regardless of learners’proficiency level, the study of the performance by all the subjects indicates that they perform best in [+SR+HK] context and [+SR-HK] context both, then in [-SR-HK] context, while they have the greatest trouble in [-SR+HK] context, then in [Conventional usage]. And their excellent performance in the acquisition of articles in [+SR+HK] context and [+SR-HK] context indicates a relatively ease of detection of the semantic feature [+SR].Then, the main language-related causes for English learners’article selection have been analyzed through basic analysis of the reasons provided by learners themselves and cognitive analysis in terms of interlingual interference and intralingual interference. The findings include:first, learners in the higher proficiency group are more capable of expressing their metalinguistic knowledge for their choices than those in lower proficiency group; second, learners’failure in choosing the correct article is generally due to misdetection of countability, problems with referentiality, problems with collocations or other reasons, among which problems with referentiality (especially the misdetection of [±HK]) pose a major obstacle to appropriate article use; third, for lack of articles in Chinese, interlingual interference, as a complex cognitive mechanism, manifests itself in the omission of articles and the confusion of a/an in English and "-"(yi) in Chinese; fourth, intralingual interference is embodied in learners’neglect of the in [-SR+HK] context and their misuse of the in [+SR-HK] and [-SR-HK] context.Providing empirical evidence of article acquisition for both language scholars and teachers, the above findings reveal a clear picture of Chinese college students’ acquisition of English articles with different semantic features, and identify the main language-related causes that underlie article misuse. Based on the findings, some implications for article teaching are provided. For example, successive and systematic instructions about semantic features are needed to help learners overcome their difficulties in article use; classroom teaching practice should follow the acquisition sequence of articles and teachers should be patient and tolerant towards students’ errors at different stages of article acquisition.