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Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Serbian. Findings from a recent study (Chen, 2004) have, however, indicated that the Chinese numeral yi (one) is in the process of being grammaticalized as an equivalent to the English indefinite article a since it can serve all the major functions that a can play. It can be argued that yi (one) has “reached the endpoint of grammaticalization into an indefinite article” (p. 1177).
Third, different methodological approaches are employed. Some studies are longitudinal, while others are pseudo-longitudinal or cross-sectional. Mingled with different methodological approaches are different tasks used to elicit data: fill-in-the-blank task, forced-choice elicitation task, multiple-choice cloze task, multiple-choice insertion task, referential communication task, translation task, acceptability judgment task, grammaticality judgment task, story-telling task, and informal interview, to name a few. The data collected can also vary in emphasis on spontaneous or non-spontaneous production, individual, group, or corpus data, and written or spoken data.
It appears that the lack of conclusive answers in many areas of SLA research is nothing new. The myriad inconclusive or contradictory findings clearly show nothing but that second language acquisition is a very complicated process. Amidst the inconclusive or contradictory findings, the following generalizations, however, could be drawn regarding the acquisition and use of English articles by L2 learners.
Staged Development
There are natural orders for acquiring the English article system and for acquiring each individual type of article. A series of discrete stages L2 learners go through can be identified and described.
Incremental Process
The acquisition of semantic features of a particular article takes place incrementally rather than all at once. In other words, L2 learners acquire certain features or functions of a particular article first before acquiring its other features or functions.