An Investigation Into The Use Of English Articles By Chinese Senior High School Students

The English article system (a, the and ?) is one of the most difficult grammatical elements to learn and to use for Chinese students whose language doesn't have articles. Overseas and native Chinese researchers have contributed to the understanding of this elusory and complex system from different perspectives. The Chinese scholars have paid much of their attention to the general description of how the English article system is used. These researchers often concentrate on one specific aspect of article usage by providing lists of example plus brief explanations. Only some researchers have carried empirical studies and the subjects for the studies are all college students. Therefore, the researcher carries on an empirical study to make clear the errors committed by English learners in senior high middle school.The current study sets out to investigate the performances of 43 English learners in senior high school on the use of articles with a test instrument to provide some suggestion for English article teaching in China. The study mainly consists of four parts. First, design a test paper to investigate the errors in the article aspect. Then, hand out the test papers to the subject. Later, correct these collected papers to pick out errors. At last, count and classify all the errors and the results are analyzed according to methodology of Error Analysis and Huebner's adaptation of Bickerton's semantic space method of evaluation.Therefore, the research yields the following findings: the article system is adequately mastered by English learners in senior high middle school, and the errors they committed have certain patters. The results revealed the order of accuracy in article choice is: a>the>?. In the first classification of article errors based on form, the article redundancy is the most frequently occurring in the test. In the second classification of article errors based on semantic function, in the first part of article filling-blanks, the third type error ([+SR], [-HK]) is the most of all the five types, while in the second part of the test, the use of definite articles in idioms or conventional phrases is the most problematic. The difference between the accuracy in the two parts illustrates that different task can influence the use of articles. The last classification makes English teachers see the article function from a new angle and help students to learn and categorize NPs to choose the proper article rather than the memorization of many abstract rules.