An Empirical Study On Chinese EFL Learners' Article Acquisition From The Perspective Of Feature Reassembly Hypothesis

It is often observed that Chinese EFL learners substitute the for a,or substitute a for the,or omit articles in obligatory contexts in their article acquisition.Not only do the elementary learners show this phenomenon,but also the advanced learners make those errors.Then,what actually causes Chinese EFL learners' difficulty in their article production? Previous studies on article acquisition by second language learners evolve from the acquisition of the semantic features of articles to the prosodic representation of articles,from the morphological distribution of articles to the acquisition of the syntactic system of articles.The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis,based on Minimalist Program,takes features of the target language as focusing points so as to uncover the causes of the variability of interlanguage and find out the factors influencing the mapping between abstract syntactic knowledge and surface morphology.This paper is designed to probe into the knowledge representations of articles by Chinese EFL learners in their mental grammar,and explore whether they can make a distinction between the definite article and the indefinite articles,as well as how their article knowledge develops over time.The participants in this study are composed of three groups with different English proficiency levels and a total of 150 participants are selected.According to the results of participants in Oxford Quick Placement Test and the removal of invalid questionnaires,90 participants are obtained as the final research objects.The Forced Choice Elicitation Task adopted by this study is compiled by the research team of second language acquisition in Essex University,which aims at testing second language learners' article acquisition.After all the questionnaires are collected,SPSS18.0 is used to describe and analyze the results of participants' overall acquisition of articles and the performance of participants in different feature patterns.The results are summarized as follows: Firstly,the knowledge representations of participants for different kinds of articles are different.During the process of article acquisition,zero article is the most difficult one,then,the indefinite article a,lastly,the definite article the.At the same time,for participants with different proficiency levels,their knowledge representations of articles show the same tendency,that is,the difficult order is ? > a > the.Secondly,Chinese EFL learners can distinguish the definite article from the indefinite articles,though they sometimes make substitution errors,like the for a,a for the,or omission errors.They are sensitive to the definiteness feature,but,with different degrees of sensitivity.In different feature patterns,they can produce the target article and discern different kinds of articles.Finally,there is an ascending developmental tendency in Chinese EFL learners' article acquisition.With the improvement of their proficiency level,their accurate rate of article production increases accordingly.As to different kinds of articles,the higher their proficiency level is,the more accurate their article production will be.It needs to be pointed out that according to the results of SPSS18.0,there is no significant difference between the intermediate group and the advanced group in terms of the acquisition of zero article,despite the relatively higher accuracy of the advanced group.Meanwhile,in different feature patterns,participants with different proficiency levels also present a rising line in their article acquisition.The accurate rate of article production increases with the improvement of their proficiency level.But the result in SPSS18.0 indicates that there are no marked differences between the advanced group and the intermediate group in indefinite plural countable context and indefinite mass context.The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis,proposed by Lardiere,is fully validated in this paper.The difficulty performed by Chinese EFL learners in their article acquisition can be well explained under the framework of Feature Reassembly Hypothesis.At the same time,this study provides reference and guidance for English teaching in China and,to some extent,makes a contribution to the theoretical development of second language acquisition.