Grammar and the Chinese ESL Learner: A Longitudinal Study on the ...

foreigners with a near perfect command of, say, French or English, can often be detected as non-native speakers solely on the basis of their faulty article usage” (p. 23). Hence, finding an efficient way to teach and learn the English article system is of great pedagogical significance.

In short, what has motivated researchers in studying the acquisition and learning of English articles is the desire to reveal the interaction between linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge, to reveal the process of acquiring the referential system, to reveal the process of acquiring a complicated linguistic system, and to reveal the strategies used to learn something frequently used yet difficult to master.

First Language Article Acquisition Studies

Studies of the first language (L1) acquisition of English have provided some evidence about when and how children start to acquire the article system along with other grammatical elements. Leopold (1939, 1949) made a careful record of the speech development in English and German of his daughter, Hildegard. He kept a diary in great detail and without interruption from Hildegard’s eighth week until the end of her seventh year. It was observed that the indefinite article a occurred when Hildegard was 2:1 years old while the definite article the occurred when she was 2:4 years old. In other words, the indefinite article was found to occur earlier than the definite article in her speech even though they both were first used at the age of 2. Leopold (1949) also compared his results with those of a number of other studies regarding the time when articles began to occur in child speech. The times when articles began to be used were observed as 1:9 in Ament’s 1912 survey of the history of child-research, as 1:11 in Gregoire’s 1933 study of two children; as 2:2–3 in Preyer’s 1882 careful and detailed observations of his own son during his first 1000 days; as 2:8 in Cohen’s 1925 selected observations of three children; and as age 4 in Bergmann’s 1919 selective record of his two children’s language development over 10 years. As evident from those research findings, children begin to acquire the use of articles around the age of two to three years.