| Chapter 1: | The Problem |
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(Cook, 1993; R. Ellis, 1994; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991). In a sense, research on the nature of systems in IL cannot claim to be successful until all the acquisition sequences in IL have been clearly isolated and identified. There is an urgent need, therefore, to further explore and discover the new acquisition sequences exhibited in phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse structures. In addition, most of the acquisition sequences identified to date are quite language specific. As a corollary, they lack generalizability or universality. A related problem is that identified developmental sequences are often linked with learners of some specific linguistic backgrounds. Further research aimed at confirming those discovered acquisition sequences to learners with different language backgrounds needs to be carried out.
Statement of the Problem
It has been observed that “the article in English has always been considered one of the most formidable problems to overcome in teaching English grammar to foreigners, and its misuse is one of the most evident grammatical signs that a person is not a native speaker of English” (Whitman, 1974, p. 253). As claimed by Robberecht (1983), the English article system is “one of the notorious problem areas that foreign learners of the language are faced with” (p. 61). Quite ironically, the English article system is one of the most frequently used linguistic systems in the English language. In one of the widely used word frequency counts (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971), the definite article ranks first while the indefinite article ranks fourth. In a word-frequency analysis based on the Birmingham corpus, a well-known language corpus which consists of 18 million words of text, the is found to be the most frequently used word while a is ranked as the fifth most frequently used word. It has been found in the corpus that the and a together with of, and, to, in, that, it, I, and was account for 23% of all English text (Taylor, 1990, p. 23). As further calculated by Berry (1991), the articles account for almost every 10th word in English if one adds the percentage frequency of the definite article and the indefinite article together. Berry’s finding has been