A Study Of Factors Affecting Chinese English Learners’ Article Acquisition

English learners’ article acquisition, as a result of the highest frequency and complex usages of English articles, remains an obstacle, especially for those who se mother tongue is article-less language. The process of articles’ acquisition, thus, becomes one of the hot topics of SLA studies. Numerous studies have been carried out with the goal of identifying where such acquisition difficulty and article misuse lie, from different perspectives, such as semantic, pragmatic, language transfer, etc. Though these previous researches have yielded plentiful data and evidence suggesting that there are multiple factors at play, there hasn’t been a full and convincing picture of the causes to the difficult acquisition of articles.The present study, based on the framework of the Fluctuation Hypothesis and t he Syntactic Misanalysis Account, using a forced elicitation task, attempted to look into the factors influencing the C hinese English learners’ article acquisition, particularly, focusing on two factors: specificity and explicitly stated knowledge(ESK), due to the fact that the Fluctuation Hypothesis attributes the article acquisition difficulties and choice errors only to the semantic factor definiteness and specificity, while the Syntactic Misanalysis Account attributes them only to the pragmatic factor ESK. Our study claims that it is, maybe, the combination of the two factors that influences the article acquisition, and the two factors, maybe, have different influence on second language learners at different language proficiency. To be more specific, this study aims to address the following two research questions:(1) How does C hinese learners’ language proficiency affect their acquisition of articles?(2) What are the role of specificity and ESK playing on the acquisition of articles? Is there any individual difference among learners at different proficiency levels?In order to gain expected result of the article acquisition of learners at different proficiency, the study made a survey among 150 English learner participants from a College of Foreign Languages of a key university and a key high school in Shandong Province. A mong them 50 are English major seniors, 50 English major freshmen, and 50 senior high students of Grade One. There is also a control group, made up of 10 native English speakers. The subjects represent three different levels of English proficiency respectively. That is, they were defined as advanced levels, intermediate, and low- intermediate. The participants took a forced elicitation task which consists of 24 short items and are instructed to fill in appropriate articles. The 24 items or dialogues are classified into six context types, that is, [+Definite, +Specificity, +ESK], [-Definite,-Specificity,-ESK], [+Definite, +Specificity,-ESK], [-Definite, +specific,-ESK], [+Definite,-Specificity,-ESK], [-Definite, +Specificity, +ESK]. The research methods adopted in the present study is a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The collected data was processed by SPSS 20.0 by a series of one-way ANOVA and repeated measure ANOVA, and the students’ explanations why they chose the article was analyzed in a qualitative way.The results show that:(1) The correct use of articles is higher in the advanced group than the intermediate group and low- intermediate group. However, there is a significant difference between the advanced group and the other two groups, but no significant difference between intermediate and low- intermediate group. In indefinite contexts, L2 learners tend to overuse the more in [+Specificity, +ESK] than other two types. At the same time, in definite contexts, they the overuse of a is more in [+Specificity,-ESK] than the other two types. The combination of specificity and ESK influence the article acquisition. However, they play different roles among different language levels in different context types. In indefinite context, ESK plays an equal role for learners of different levels, but in definite context, ESK has a less influence to high proficiency learners than the lower proficiency learners.There are, of course, some limitations about the present study, such as, the limited number of participants, only one forced elicitation task to collect data. These are the very points that need to be accomplished in further research. However, in global view, the findings of the present study enrich the theories of article acquisition and are of some significance for English learners, grammar teachers and textbook designers.