A Study Of Article Errors By Senior High School Learners

Articles, as a kind of determiners, belong to functional words. Although articles include three types:the indefinite article al an, the definite article the and the zero article, the usage of articles is rather complicated. Mastering articles is a difficult task for English learners. As the system of articles is absent in Chinese language, it is particularly difficult for learners to understand and use articles. Moreover, the article errors made by English learners are widespread.Based on the method of Error Analysis, this paper attempts to study article errors committed by senior high school learners. The data of this research are taken from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Two research questions are to be answered in this study.1. What are the main kinds of article errors committed by senior high school learners?2. What are the possible causes for the article errors by senior high school learners?The major findings of the research are as follows:First, the article errors by senior high school learners can be classified into three major categories:absence, addition and confusion, and these categories of article errors can be further divided into eight types. Of the three categories of article errors, the absence of articles is more frequent than article addition and article addition than article confusion. This paper also investigates the causes for article errors, including the instability of interlanguage, interlingual transfer and intralingual errors. At last, based upon the analysis of article errors, this paper seeks to offer some suggestions and solutions to the teaching of articles:knowledge of articles should be taught systematically in combination with the knowledge of nouns; learners’input should be enhanced with the help of corpora and concordance tools and error analysis should be employed to facilitate article teaching.