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A fourth factor concerns pedagogy and the role of instruction in SLA. As noted by Whitman (1974), “the article in English has always been considered one of the most formidable problems to overcome in teaching English grammar to foreigners” (p. 253). A colleague of mine, who has taught courses in English Grammar at the college level for almost 30 years, has concurred with Whitman’s observation by telling me that “when and how to use English articles is indeed the most difficult question to answer in my grammar class during my entire academic career” (personal communication with Edward Heckler, February 18, 2009). Teachers are often at a loss when facing L2 learners’ requests for simple and straightforward rules for English articles, and when facing L2 learners’ random use of English articles. For many English teachers, “effectively teaching the article system to their students often remains an illusive goal” (Butler, 2002, p. 452). Hence, there is a pressing need to exploit and develop an effective and efficient pedagogy that can facilitate L2 learners’ acquisition of English articles.
The accepted position of treating English articles as the head of Determiner Phrases (DPs) in the generative perspective and tradition has also contributed to inspire further studies on the acquisition and uses of English articles. In traditional grammar, content words play a much more important role than function words. Content words can project to phrases so that we have Noun Phrases (NPs), Verb Phrases (VPs), Adjective Phrases (APs), and Adverb Phrases (AdvPs). In contrast, function words, as their name suggests, simply perform grammatical functions in forming sentences, and in creating structural relationships into which the content words may fit. They cannot project to phrases and assume the role as the head of phrases. New perspectives in generative linguistics propose that functional categories such as complementizers and auxiliaries can also project to the phrasal level. Therefore, complementizers, serving as the syntactic head of a full clause, project to Complementizer Phrase (CP), and auxiliaries project to Inflection Phrase (IP), which constitutes the extended projection of the lexical head, the verb.
Following this line of reasoning, Abney (1987) observed that there are many similarities between nominal domains and clausal domains.