Grammar and the Chinese ESL Learner: A Longitudinal Study on the Acquisition of the English Article System
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only for a limited period in early life. Exposure to samples of language during that critical period fixes the values of the features and associates them with particular morphophonological realizations. Beyond the critical period the virtual, unspecified features disappear, leaving only those features encoded in the lexical entries for particular lexical items. (p. 216)

Though there is no consensus, it has been widely reported that the L2 proficiency level affects L2 learners’ use of English articles (see, among others, Liu & Gleason, 2002; Robertson, 2000). A higher accuracy rate in using English articles has been observed when the L2 learners’ proficiency level increases.

Other factors that are unknown or have no roles in FLA, and that have an impact on L2 learners’ use and acquisition of English articles, include the complexity of the task (Pongpairoj, 2007), instructional help (Nassaji & Swain, 2000), variability (Robertson, 2000), fossilization (White, 2003), metalinguistic knowledge (Butler, 2002), age (Zdorenko & Paradis, 2008), and native language effects (Gass & Mackey, 2002).

L2 Complexities

The English article system, though frequently used, is complex, obscure, and non-salient. It is ambiguous in the sense that it is based on a complex set of abstract distinctions that are arbitrarily mapped onto the surface forms of indefinite, definite and zero articles. Master (2002) identified the following three sources of difficulties in the acquisition and use of the English article system in terms of L2 complexities:

(1) the articles, which include the words a, an, the, and Ø, the invisible zero/null article, are among the most frequently occurring function words in the language…, making continuous conscious rule application difficult over an extended stretch of discourse; (2) function words are normally unstressed and consequently very difficult if not impossible for a NNS to discern, thus affecting the availability of input in the spoken mode; and (3) the article system stacks multiple functions onto a single morpheme, a considerable burden for the learner, who generally looks for a