An Empirical Study Of English Articles Misusages By Chinese Students

English article is used universally in English. Although, it includes only three elements of definite article the, indefinite article a/an and zero article, yet for Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners whose language have no article system, English article is unanimously agreed to be the most complex grammatical points in the filed of second language learning and teaching. There are a great many of studies abroad concerning on article system, which ranging from its original meaning, usage classification and acquisition process to pedagogical implications. All theses studies have contributed to giving us a general description on articles usage and its empirical analysis. But in China, the research of English article system has been emphasized on its functional usage, not many empirical studies are represented.Therefore, this research makes an empirical study of articles misusages upon150college students of different majors, its purpose is to investigate how these students acquire the English article system and find out the possible causes and rules of errors during their articles learning process, so as to provide some useful implications for our English teaching programs. Three kind of testing forms are guided to the present research, they are articles completion test, a writing assignments and a question-and-answer task. All the findings are calculated by Excel2003. After a detailed statistic analysis, the subjects’articles acquisition among different language proficiency stages is represented:1. Almost all the students even the advanced ones (CET-4scores of550or more, CET-6scores of520or more) still have difficulties in articles usage.2. According to the findings, the misusages of English article can be divided into omission, confusion and overuse.3. Of the three kinds of error classification in the research, nearly half of students prefer to omit article, and the confusion error ranks the second, then the last frequency misusages is overuse.4. After analyzing the subjects’ CET scores with articles accuracy rate, it is obviously show that on the whole there is a strong correlation between these two factors, especially for the students of English majors.5. The articles misusages are caused by two or three factors rather than any single cause. More specially, the native transfer and intralingual errors are the main causes of the articles misusages. Besides that, learners extensive knowledge, memory discrepancy, learning motivation and learning environment are all lead to the misusages of article.Based on this empirical research, some suggestions are offered:firstly, Chinese EFL learners should pay highly attention to English article system. Meanwhile, for English teachers, the rules of articles misusages should be taken seriously to guide their English articles teaching in efficient way.