A Study On The Acquisition Of English Articles By Senior High School Students From The Perspective Of Feature Reassembly Hypothesis

Acquisition of English articles has long been the research interest in the area of second language acquisition.There have been numerous studies conducted on English articles at home and abroad.The article system has three forms,the,a(n)and ?.Previous studies mainly studied it from the perspective of semantics and morphology,but they seemed unable to explain convincingly the pattern of accuracy of the three types of articles.Lardiere put forward the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis,which states that acquiring a second language grammar requires that the learner reconfigure or remap features from the way these are represented in the L1 into new formal configurations on possibly quite different types of lexical items in the L2.As a new research perspective in recent years,the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis has proved to have strong explanatory power in second language acquisition.There were a few studies which attempted to adopt this perspective to investigate the acquisition of articles.Up till now,no studies have investigated exclusively Chinese senior high school students‘ acquisition of the English articles from the perspective of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis.This paper attempts to investigate Chinese senior high school students‘ acquisition of English articles from the perspective of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis,which will be a supplement to the research on senior high school students‘ acquisition of English articles.The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods,with a view to investigating Chinese senior high school students‘ patterns of article use and the causes of the patterns from the perspective of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis.The participants were 44 Chinese senior high school students learning English as a foreign language.The study collected data by employing the missing word task,the translation task and the retrospective interview.We use Pica‘s TLU(Target-like use)analysis to calculate the participants‘ accuracy of article use.The results revealed that in the translation task,Chinese senior high school students have better mastery of the definite article the than the indefinite article a(n),which is consistent with previous studies.However,the pattern was reversed for the article use in the missing word task,which could be a result of considerable omission in this task.Additionally,the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis seemed to provide good insight into explaining the article use pattern by Chinese senior high school students.According to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis,the higher the complexity of feature reassembly,the more difficult it is to learn.For Chinese senior high school students,the complexity of the feature reassembly for the indefinite article a is higher than that of the definite article the.That is why Chinese senior high school students have better mastery of the definite article the than the indefinite article a(n).The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis provides new insight into English article acquisition and has significant implications for the learning and teaching of English articles.