A Comparative Study Of Errors Of English Article Use By College Students Of English Major And Non-English Major In Inner Mongolia

English articles are taught to L2learners from the very beginning of English learning. However, they are still among the most difficult elements, especially for those whose first language lacks article system like Chinese. For this reason, there has been a growing interest in L2acquisition of articles, especially in L2learners’ misuse of articles. Lots of researches show that the article system is never adequately mastered by Chinese learners, and that errors exist even when the L2learners have reached the advanced level of proficiency. Among all these researches, none of them has made a comparative research between English majors and non-English majors based on a guided-writing task. This enlightens me to do this research to find out the weak points of both English majors and non-English majors in the use of English articles.The purposes of this research are to find out1) how students from universities in Inner Mongolia perform in their SLA of the generic use of English articles;2) how English majors and non-English majors perform respectively in their use of English articles when they were assigned with the same writing task; and3) what we can learn from the research to guide our future pedagogical work.To attain the purposes of the research, an experiment was conducted by asking180English majors and180non-English majors from IMU, IMUT, IMAU, IMNU, IMFEC and IMMC to write an essay of250words on the topic of The Most Memorable Thing or The Most Unforgettable Thing within30minutes. At last60effective papers of EMs and60of NEMs were picked out. By analyzing the errors of article use in these papers, we have five major findings:1Errors of EMs are almost equal in number to errors of NEMs;2The proportion of analyzable errors to errors of category Ⅴ of Group Ⅱ is almost half to half, while the proportion of Group Ⅰ is almost seven to one;3Among the four categories of analyzable errors, category Ⅰ ranks first in both groups;4The comparative result of Category Ⅱ shows that both groups are prone to omit the in the environment of [+SR,+HK];5NEMs incline to overuse the in almost all the idiomatic and conventional situations.After the comparison of the results of the two groups, the acquisition order of Group Ⅰ turns out to be zero>a/an>the and Group Ⅱ to be a/an>the>zero. This result shows that English teachers should teach to EMS articles in an order of zero, a/an, and the, and teach NEMs in the sequence of a/an, the, and zero.