A Study On Chinese College Students’ Acquisition Of English Articles From The Perspective Of Language Interface

English articles belong to a type of functional category,and their usage should conform to the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic rules,etc.Recently,a lot of studies have been conducted on the acquisition of English articles,which found that learners with different language backgrounds meet with different difficulties in their learning process.Relatively,less has been done to explore Chinese college students’ acquisition of English articles from the perspective of language interface,or most researchers only concentrated on the single interface while ignoring the significance of the multi-interface.From the perspective of language interface,this study investigates the specific rules of Chinese college students’ acquisition of English articles from the syntax-semantics,syntax-pragmatics and semantic-pragmatics interfaces and puts forward the corresponding hypotheses below:(1)Given that there are no articles in Chinese,the syntax-semantics interface in articles is nonexistent in Chinese.However,for the meaning similarities between Chinese“ 一 ” plus quantifiers and English indefinite article a,this study predicts that Chinese learners’ major problem in using articles lies in the omission and misuse of a.(2)At the syntax-pragmatics interface,Chinese learners are more prone to fluctuate in article selection in an ambiguous context.(3)From the perspective of semantic-pragmatics interface,Chinese learners are more likely to misuse the before the noun where the noun leads to the topic of the English sentence.In order to verify these hypotheses,this study adopted quantitative research method and chose 60 non-English major freshmen as the subjects,collecting the experimental data through the questionnaire.After systematic analysis of these data by JASP,it can be concluded that(1)From the perspective of syntax-semantics interface,Chinese learners are more likely to misuse indefinite articles and zero article on the whole.Thus the first hypothesis is valid.(2)At the syntax-pragmatics interface,this study found that the article use in ambiguous context is only difficult for learners of low English proficiency level,as they would fluctuate in article choice.Therefore,the second hypothesis is invalid.(3)From the perspective of semantic-pragmatics interface,this study verified Chinese learners’ misuse of the before the noun where the noun leads to the topic of the English sentence.The third hypothesis is valid.This study analyzes Chinese college students’ acquisition of English articles from the perspective of multi-interface,which to some extent presents a wide range of possibilities for researchers to conduct language acquisition studies.Moreover,based on the findings of this study,both teachers’ and students’ minds in their teaching and learning of English articles are broadened.