| Chapter 1: | The Problem |
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- 2. The informant remains accessible for the duration of this study.
- 3. The informant’s use of the English articles exhibits at least some sequence of development when one examines samples of his language utterances.
Limitations
Several limitations for the present study can be speculated as follows:
- 1. Generalizations from any empirical study to a larger population of learners should always be made with extreme caution, let alone a study with a single informant. As Fasold (1975) correctly pointed out, “impressive results from one analysis can be accepted only tentatively until they are replicated by another set of data” (pp. 37–38). With this in mind, it would be premature to accept the results obtained from the present study as something more than an initial examination of how English articles are acquired by Chinese ESL learners.
- 2. The data collected within a specified time frame for a longitudinal study can only reflect a part of the acquisition process.
- 3. The learning environment of the present informant was in the American context. This is different from those ESL learners who learn English in the Chinese context.
- 4. Audio-taping equipment may have inhibited the informant’s use of English even after he was accustomed to its presence.