A Study On The Effects Of English Article Instruction For Senior High School Students:Definiteness And Specificity

Articles,including the definite,indefinite and zero articles,are a kind of function words in English.Because of the complicated semantic features and no corresponding parts of speech in Chinese,articles have become one of the difficult points for Chinese students in English learning.Scholars from both abroad and at home have analyzed and discussed the acquisition of articles from multiple perspectives,making the research results abundant.So far,however,in most of the research on English article acquisition,the subjects have been undergraduates and few middle school or high school students.Viewing this,based on the Noticing Hypothesis and the theory of Explicit Instruction and Implicit Instruction as the theoretical framework,the study shows the impact of instruction on English article learning for high school students.This research specifically answers the following two questions:(1)What are the main problems of senior high school students' use of English articles?(2)Does explicit instruction on definiteness and specificity of English articles help senior high school students reduce their problems of misusing articles?In order to answer the two research questions above,the design of the pre-test and the post-test with a control group was adopted.The subjects were 121 students from Class 3(61)and Class 4(60)from a senior high school of Gansu Province.The two parallel classes were divided into the control group(CG)and the experimental group(EG)respectively.And the entire experiment lasted four weeks.The subjects were first provided with a pre-test,then were instructed on definiteness and specificity in CG and EG respectively,and finally they needed to finish a post-test.The collected data was analyzed using SPSS 21.0.Based on the data analysis,conclusions can be reached as follows:(1)The data in the pre-test showed that the students did not fully grasp the use of articles.More specifically,confusion of article errors occurred most frequently,and then redundancy,the omission ranked the last.(2)The data in the post-test showed that the subjects have improved in using articles.Compared with the subjects with implicit instruction of CG,the students with explicit instruction in EG improved more significantly.This shows that explicit instruction on definiteness and specificity of English articles can help high school students reduce their misuse of articles.The study presents that semantic complexity is a major cause of misuse of articles,and explicit instruction of definiteness and specificity helps students confirm that definiteness is the basis for choosing articles.