| Chapter 1: | The Problem |
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supported by Nation and Waring (1997), who concluded that the “occurs so frequently that about 7% of the words on a page of written English and the same proportion of the words in a conversation are repetitions of the word the” (pp. 8–9). The English article system is also a complex syntactic phenomenon both from the linguistic point of view (Chomsky, 1962; Christophersen, 1939; Hewson, 1972; Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985) and from the viewpoint of language learning (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1983; Grannis, 1972; Master, 1995). Because of its frequent use, its multifaceted nature and its potential to reflect the complexity as well as the systematicity involved in the process of SLA, the acquisition or the acquisition sequence of the English articles has been the focus or part of the focus of a number of important studies documented in the current research literature of SLA (see Bailey, Madden, & Krashen, 1974; Chaudron & Parker, 1990; Dulay & Burt, 1974; Gorokhova, 1990; Hakuta, 1976; Huebner, 1983; Lee, Cameron, Linton, & Hunt, 1994; Master, 1988; Parrish, 1987; Thomas, 1989a, 1989b; Sharon, 1993; among others). Research to date has reported the following: (1) the definite article the is acquired before a(n) (Thomas, 1989a); (2) the acquisition sequence of the article system is in the order of the, a(n) andzero article for learners whose native languages have an article system (Gorokhova, 1990; Master, 1988); and (3) the acquisition sequence of the article system is in the order of zero article, the and a(n) for learners whose native languages have no article system (Master, 1988).
Although there have appeared no findings that challenge these proposed sequences so far, several issues relating to these sequences still remain unsettled and call for further research. First, these sequences need to be tested against learners with different language backgrounds for their validity and universality. The baseline data of Chinese ESL learners, for example, is useful in this regard since there is no article system in Chinese. Moreover, in the current literature there is little longitudinal data available concerning Chinese-speaking children’s acquisition of English articles. Second, the proposed sequences often use a(n) as a cover term to combine a and an. This clearly implies that a and an are acquired at the same time. However, without convincing explanations, more empirical