The Acquisition of English Articles by Arabic L2-English learners: A Semantic Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the acquisition of English articles by Arabic second language (L2) learners of English as a function of different linguistic contexts contrasted based upon two semantic notions: definiteness and specificity. The participants in this study are 30 adult learners of L2 English whose first language (L1) is Arabic. The data for this study consist of the participants' responses to a forced-choice elicitation task targeting the use of articles in English. The results show that the learners were more accurate in terms of their article usage in definite contexts than in indefinite contexts regardless of specificity. While advanced learners performed native-like and converged to the target system of articles in English in all of the semantic contexts, low proficiency learners and intermediate learners made several errors, the most common of which was article omission in obligatory contexts. Moreover, the results show that the low proficiency learners fluctuated between definiteness and specificity in the two crucial mismatching semantic contexts: [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific], overusing the indefinite article in the former context and overusing the definite article in the latter context. Unlike the low proficiency learners, the intermediate learners did not fluctuate between definiteness and specificity. The study proposes a development model for the acquisition of the English article system by Arabic learners of L2 English incorporating the Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) and drawing on the available sources of linguistic knowledge in second language acquisition (SLA). Introduction and Theoretical Background A great amount of second language acquisition (SLA) research has reported that the acquisition of the English article system (and article systems in other languages) is problematic for learners of English as a second language (L2) or foreign language (FL), especially for those learners whose first language (L1) lacks an article system or among several others). The problems L2 learners of English have with the use of English articles fall into different linguistic types, demonstrate various error patterns, and come from a variety of sources. Ionin (2003) and Ionin et al. (2004) report that two types of errors are commonly committed by English language learners and repeatedly documented in SLA research: article omission and article misuse or substitution; the latter is typically characterized by the overuse of the definite article the to incorrectly replace the indefinite article a (in contexts that require the use of the indefinite article). In their review of the literature on the acquisition of articles in L2 English, Zdorenko and Paradis (2007, 2008) notice that adult L2-English learners omitted articles in both definite and indefinite linguistic contexts (i.e., used bare nouns) and incorrectly substituted one article in the context of another, especially the for a, and that it is not before late stages of acquisition that adult L2-English learners reach native-like performance on articles and determiners in general, if ever. White (2008) report three kinds of problems with the acquisition of articles: dropping articles in obligatory contexts, incorrect substitution of one article for the other, especially the for a in English, and 'oversuppliance' of articles in indefinite plural contexts, where a zero-article (i.e., bare noun) is required.