Acquisition Of The Article The By Chinese ESL Learners

There are three article forms in English: the indefinite article a(an),the definite article the and the zero article ?.Researchers in the field of SLA have now reached a consensus that the acquisition of the English article system is a difficulty to most second language(L2)learners.Based on Liu & Gleason's(2002)categorization of the nongeneric uses of the,this study attempts to investigate Chinese ESL learners' acquisition of the nongeneric the,with a combination of two research instruments: questionnaires and interviews,to address three research questions:(1)In what order do Chinese ESL learners acquire the four nongeneric uses of the?(2)What are the differences in the four nongeneric uses between different English proficiency groups? And(3)what cause the missed use and overuse of the for Chinese ESL learners?The research methodology consists of two parts.In the first part,72 participants from Henan University were asked to complete a questionnaire of grammaticality judgement task(originally designed by Liu and Gleason).The researchers coded and classified the error types and then analyzed data in SPSS Statistics 20.In the second part,nine randomly selected participants were then asked to complete the second task---a follow-up interview based on the questionnaire.Their rationalizations for their judgements would allow us to investigate the underlying reasons for their misuse of the.The following are the three major findings in the present study:(1)the four nongeneric uses of the present different levels of difficulty to ESL Chinese learners.The acquisition of the nongeneric uses follows a natural order---situation use,textual use,structural use,and cultural use;(2)learners' missed use of obligatory the decreases as their English proficiency level improves,although the improvement in cultural use is not significant.Learners' nonobligatory overuse increases from low to intermediate level and then decreases as their English proficiency develops to advanced level;and(3)the causes for the misuse of the(missed obligatory use and overuse)can be multiple---besides the one-to-many form and function mappings of the,native language influence and the strategy of overgeneralization also contribute to the difficulty.Therefore,some pedagogical implications are proposed:(1)teachers should help students learn the nongeneric uses of the in a way that taps their acquisitional order and abilities;and(2)teachers should inform students of the typological differences between English and Chinese to mitigate the effects of their L1.