An Analysis Of The Misuse Of Zero Article By Chinese High School Students And Its Teaching Methods

There are three kinds of articles in English:definite article, indefinite article and zero article. Most learners are not familiar with the usages of zero article. In order to find an efficient method to teach subjects how to use zero article and give suggestions to future teaching, we compared the learning outcome of competency-based method and grammar-translation method, then we analyzed the errors made by the subjects. In this study high school students from Jinan No.7 Middle School are selected as the subjects, and they are divided into two groups:the experiment group and the control group. Analysis of errors of zero article is based on Error Analysis theory.The experiment group was taught by competency-base method and the control group was taught by grammar translation method. The pre-test and the post-test are used to check learning outcomes of those two groups and find out which teaching method is better. The pre-test is designed to check students’proficiency level of the use of articles. In the post-test, wrong use of zero article is analyzed separately in the gap-filling test and the compositions. Major findings are as followed:1. Both the control group and the experiment group have a low proficiency level of zero article in the pre-test.2. The experiment group achieves better than the control group in the post test, but there is no significant difference between those two groups. So we can’t say competency-based method is better than grammar-translation method when we teach zero article3. Addition of definite article is the main factor of errors of zero article, the occurring-frequency of generic use of zero article ranks at the first place of all errors.4. The major sources of article errors are internal sources and external sources.