A Study Of English Article Errors In Chinese College English Majors’ Writings From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

It is commonly accepted that English articles, consisting of the indefinite articlea/an, the definite article the and the zero article play a significant role in theexpression of language. However, as there are no equivalents of articles in Chinese, itis confirmed that English articles are the most difficult and the latest part to be fullyacquired by Chinese EFL learners, even for advanced level learners.Substantial researches are carried out on the acquisition of English articles, butmost of them fail to probe into the cognitive process of the learners. The hypothesis ofconceptual transfer, proposed by Pavlenko and Jarvis (1998), probes into languagetransfer from the perspective of concepts. Under the theoretical framework ofconceptual transfer, the present research attempts to explore the article errorscommitted by Chinese college English majors in their writings which are extractedfrom the two sub-corpora ST5and ST6in CLEC in order to answer the three researchquestions:(1)What are the frequencies of articles errors in the writings of collegeEnglish majors extracted from ST5and ST6?(2) What is the classification of articleerrors in ST5and ST6?(3) What are the underlying causes of article errors from theperspective of conceptual transfer?After the analysis and discussion, it is revealed that (1) Junior and senior Englishmajors commit more errors on English articles than first-year and second-yearstudents. Besides, the chi-square test shows that the statistical difference betweentheir frequencies is significant. With the help of the calculation, it can be concludedthat Chinese college English majors’ competence of using English articles does notdevelop with the improvement of their L2proficiency.(2) The article errors detectedin the research fall into three categories, article omission, article addition and articleconfusion, among which article omission takes up the highest percentage.(3) According to the theory of conceptual transfer, the underlying causes of article errorscan be summarized as the mis-mobilization of L1-based concepts in the production ofL2, mis-construction of shared concepts and mis-construction of L2-based concepts.Based on the above findings, it is suggested that in English teaching, students’conceptual inventories should be broadened for a better understanding of articles.