An investigation into the substitutions of English articles by L1 Chinese learners

Abstract

The English article system is a challenge for English second language learners, especially for learners whose language background is an articleless language. The objectives of the present study were to investigate L1 Chinese learners' problems of English article substitutions and find out possible causes of L1 Chinese learners' English article substitutions. It was hypothesized that L1 Chinese learners had problems of English article substitutions and that, based on Error Analysis, both non-existence of articles and complexity of the English article system caused English article substitutions by L1 Chinese learners. The participants in the study consisted of 60 speakers of Mandarin Chinese who majored in English at Southwest Minzu University in China. They were equally divided into an intermediate and an advanced group according to their English proficiency levels. Based on the three nominal contexts in the English article system, i.e., the [+def, +spec] context, the [-def, +spec] context, and the [-def, -spec] context (Ionin et al., 2004), data were collected from a Fill-in-the-Blank Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT), and an interview. The Fill-in-the-Blank Test and the GJT focused on learners' English article production and perception, respectively. Results from the tasks showed that both the intermediate learners and the advanced learners had problems of English article substitutions in all the three nominal contexts, confirming the first hypothesis. Based on Error Analysis, the results were caused by both interlingual and intralingual factors. For the interlingual factor, as articles are non-existent in Chinese, it could be problematic for the Chinese learners to acquire the English article system. For the intralingual factors, the L1 Chinese learners' English article substitutions were caused by the complexity of English articles as well as false concepts hypothesized. Hypothesis 2 was therefore supported. The findings of the study made a contribution to Second Language Acquisition and also provided theoretical and pedagogical implications.