A Study Of Misuses Of The Definite Article By Chinese English Majors

The extensive range for application, the complexity in semantic functions and the variety of its usages make the definite article the one of the challenging acquisition aspects. Because there is no corresponding system in Chinese, the definite article seems to be simple but actually hard to be fully acquired by Chinese English learners until their advanced level in L2. The literature review reveals that there are fewer domestic researches on the definite article’s acquisition, especially on its misuses. Therefore, the present study proposes to make an investigation on the misuse conditions of the definite article by Chinese English majors, probe into the causes of their misuse and then offer some pedagogical suggestions for English definite article learning in Chinese environment.Based on the theoretical framework of semantic wheel theory and error analysis theory, a definite article test and a corpus search are administrated to make the investigation, with the aim to answer the following questions:(1) Is there any relationship between English majors’ proficiency in L2 and their misuse in the definite article?(2) What errors do these learners make most frequently?(3) What are the probable causes for the errors? The investigation results show that, first, the misuse of the definite article by Chinese English majors is not related with their language proficiency. With more years of English learning, higher graders still make as many errors as lower graders. It is different from the conclusions from most domestic researchers who insist on the positive relationship between the accuracy and the learning level. Second, the underuse of the is a more serious problem than the overuse of the for these learners, and their errors occur frequently in the following uses of the definite article: specific referents assumed known to the hearer, shift from mass to count nouns and topic-specific generic usages, etc.The potential influencing factors of the misuses are as follows:(1) Transfer of native language. The Chinese English learners transfer the usage in Chinese that the nouns with zero marker can be regarded as the generic reference or specific reference to target language.(2) Overgeneralization of target language. The overgeneralization on specific rules for English articles by Chinese learners may lead to their overuse or underuse of the definite article.(3) The tendency of fossilization for the definite article. The acquisition of the definite article by the learners will stand still at a certain stage without improvement.(4) Acquisition difficulty in the definite article usage. A mastery of such usage as the distinction and shifts between count and uncount noun or proper and common nouns is challenging for Chinese learners of English.Based on the above results, the following pedagogical suggestions are proposed in this thesis:(1) A mastery of the classification of nouns and article usage is useful and necessary for article acquisition.(2) The interpretation on different usages of the definite article should go beyond the sentence level and depend on discourse context analysis, so that the learners’ ability to use the definite article correctly can be improved by the systematic and positive training on discourse context analysis.(3) It is necessary to include the numerous uses of the definite article, like topic-specific generic usage patterns, in an independent teaching unit with special instructions and practices.