The effectiveness of teaching articles to (-Art) ESL students in writing classes using consciousness-raising methods

The questions of whether to teach English grammar to second language learners and how to teach it have plagued the field of language acquisition for two decades. Proponents of natural acquisition (Krashen, 1982, 1994; Krashen & Terrel, 1983; Shultz, 1991) have clashed with those who believe grammar-teaching is effective if appropriate methods are used (Swain, 1985; Montgomery & Eisenstein, 1986; Fotos & Ellis, 1991; Fotos, 1994; Eisenstein Ebsworth & Schweers, 1997). This study found that second language learners do acquire grammar naturally, but it also discovered that grammar-teaching using consciousness-raising techniques can significantly accelerate learning of the targeted grammatical function. This study investigated whether teaching the article system using consciousness-raising techniques to learners who did not have an article system in their L₁ (-Art learners) would result in improvement in article usage. The study also investigated whether these learners changed the ways they used articles in their writing. The subjects were 91 Japanese students (56 experimental and 35 control). The experimental students were given explicit instruction in article usage through consciousness-raising techniques. Students who were explicitly taught articles performed statistically better on cloze tests than students who were not explicitly taught. More importantly, the experimental group made significantly fewer article errors in their writing than the control group.; The study results support the theory that learners who do not have an article system in their L₁ acquire the zero article first, then the definite article and finally the indefinite article (Parrish, 1987, Master, 1988, 1997; Thomas, 1989; Yoon, 1993). The (-Art) ESL learners in this study most substantially improved their correct use of indefinite articles. The use of determiners that often substitute for articles, (e.g., demonstratives and quantifiers) tended to diminish as students gained confidence in article use. Learners also appeared to develop tactics for avoiding using the definite and indefinite articles which resulted in their significantly increasing the correct use of the zero (ø) article.; Grammar-teaching to second language learners will continue to be a subject of debate, but agreement may be closer than the debaters believe.