An Empirical Research Into The Validity Of Fluctuation Hypothesis For L2English Article Choice Among Chinese High School EFL Learners

The English article system is a recognized obstacle for Englishsecond language (ESL) learners to conquer, especially for those learnerswhose native language does not have an article system. Ionin, Ko andWexler (2004) put forward the Fluctuation Hypothesis for L2Englisharticle choice (FH) to explain the difficulty of the English articleacquisition from the perspective of Universal Grammar. And the presentresearch is designed to test the validity of the Fluctuation Hypothesis forL2English article choice among Chinese high school English foreignlanguage (EFL) learners.In the present empirical research,50Chinese high school EFLlearners are divided into the high level group and the low level group onthe basis of their English proficiency. Then they are asked to finish aforced-choice elicitation test. In the end, the research data is analyzedwith the help of the Statistic Package of Social Science (SPSS17.0). Theone-way ANOVA tests are made among the English article uses in thefour semantic contexts ([+Def,+Spec],[+Def,-Spec],[-Def,+Spec]and [-Def,-Spec]) to investigate whether the subjects will fluctuatebetween the definiteness setting and the specificity setting. In addition,the independent sample T tests are conducted between the two groups of the different English proficiency to examine whether the fluctuation isinfluenced by the English proficiency.After the detailed comparison and discussion, it is found thatFluctuation Hypothesis for L2English article choice is also applied tohigh school English learners in China, and that the English proficiencyhas no effect on the fluctuation pattern. To sum up, the present researchsupports the validity of FH on the whole part.