| Chapter 1: | The Problem |
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Ferres, 1987; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Lee et al., 1994; Liao, 1985; Taylor & Taylor, 1990). It has also been reported that article usage is the number one teaching problem of ESL teachers (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1983), and language instructors often wonder where learners’ difficulties lie in learning articles and how to teach articles to those learners whose native languages have no article system (Greene, 1957). The discovery of the acquisition sequence incorporated with the possible strategies used by learners will provide insights for language instructors in search of effective ways of teaching English articles and will enhance their ability to assist learners in the acquisition of this difficult syntactic phenomenon.
Important Findings
Research to date has yielded the following important findings regarding the acquisition or acquisition sequence of English articles:
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1. The developmental sequence of the English article system for second language learners whose native languages have the article system is in the order of the, a(n), and zero article (Gorokhova, 1990; Master, 1988).
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2. The developmental sequence of the English article system for ESL learners whose native languages lack the article system is in the order of the zero article, the and a(n) (Master, 1988).
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3. L2 learners acquire the definite article the before a(n) (Chaudron & Parker, 1990; Thomas, 1989a).
- 4. The developmental sequence of the English definite article for Chinese ESL learners will undergo a referential place-holding phase and a referential substitution phase before it is fully acquired (Lee et al., 1994).
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5. L1 learners acquire a(n) before the (Leopold, 1949).
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6. The developmental sequence of the English article system for first language learners is in the order of a(n), the,and the zero article (Zehler & Brewer, 1982).