Teaching Strategies On The Misuse Of Articles In Junior High School English Language Teaching

Articles, as a kind of determiners, belong to functional words. Articles are used with a high frequency in English and they play a key role in successful communication. The system of articles is a complex phenomenon in both linguistics and the learning theory. As the system of articles is absent in the Chinese language, it will be difficult for Chinese students to understand and use articles.There has been substantial research of articles abroad, but in contrast, the research of articles in China has been focused on the functional use of articles with little attention to the empirical studies of articles in classroom teaching. Some teachers have discovered that students tend to neglect articles in the use of English. The misuse of articles, the incorrect omissions and the overuse of articles are quite common among students.The author of this paper has conducted a detailed survey by testing the proper use of articles among students from 2 different grades of a junior high school of Jing'an District in Shanghai. After analyzing the survey results, the author has discovered that the most likely misuse of articles for junior high students lies in the blurred distinction between the definite article, indefinite article and the zero article. The reason for this can be summarized as follows:the system of articles in English is quite complex; the absence of articles in the Chinese language becomes the negative transfer of learning English articles; students have not fully mastered the use of articles and the teachers have not paid sufficient attention to the teaching of articles. Very little is done to develop students' attention to articles. Therefore, this paper, based upon the analysis of article misuse, seeks to offer some suggestions and solutions to the teaching of articles:both the explicit and implicit teaching styles and strategies should be integrated; detailed theoretical explanation should go with communicative activities and tasks; meanwhile, students should be more exposed to English by reading more English books and materials. Ultimately, teachers should help students develop their own learning strategies and styles...