A Study Of Chinese English Learners' Article Acquisition

Articles are one of the most important elements in the English language system. The definite article the ranks top of the most frequent words in almost all native English language corpora. Opposite to the predominant position, however, findings of many researches show the fact that the English article system is one of the most difficult aspects of English grammar for non-native speakers and one of the latest to be fully acquired .There is no surprise that article acquisition becomes a hot issue in SLA filed.Many foreign scholars conduct researches on article acquisition; the findings are also fruitful. However, it should be noted that these researches are mostly made in English as L2 environment and it is not clear to what extend the findings can apply to Chinese learners who study English as a foreign language. Meanwhile, Chinese scholars have long studies English articles from the usage and syntax functions but not many empirical researches are proposed. So studies on article acquisition of the Chinese English learners are meaningful both in SLA theories as well as in pedagogical practice.Based on Multidimentional Model & Teachability Hypothesis, this study is conducted by collecting and processing data from CLEC, which is supervised by Processor Gui Shi chun and Yang Hui zhong. CLEC, i.e. Chinese Learners'English Corpus, is a balanced modern learners'corpus which consists of five sub-corpora of learner with frequency levels. Drawing on classification of article misusages in the previous studies, researches on article misusages are conducted in this thesis by collecting data not only from those tagged as np7 in CLEC but also from the relevant errors in other error tags through a manual process, aiming to improve the validity of the research. Four contexts in which article misusages are most likely to occur are presented as well.It is found in this study that Chinese English learners tend to underuse articles as they progress. What's more, of the three types of article misusages, omission is the most frequent errors which take up more than half of all the errors of the collected data. Also learners show variability regarding the types of errors in different development stages. Generally speaking, there is positive correlation between article misusages and proficiency level, though diversify displays in some of the developmental stages.This thesis suggests that interlanguage system is systematic and dynamic in nature and that article acquisition has its own sequence which will not be altered by instruction. As to the pedagogical practice, we can conclude that language teachers should hold a new view towards the article acquisition by learners and show tolerance to them. On the other hand, teachers should pay attention to the contexts that article errors tend to occur and improve the learners'sense of language use. Thus, a desirable teaching environment can be provided to promote the learning of articles.