Presenter: William Leroux
Mentor: Tyler Kendall, Linguistics
Oral Presentation
Major: Linguistics
The English article system presents one of the most challenging obstacles to learners of English hoping to obtain native-like fluency. This difficulty is in spite of its pervasiveness; the, a, and an are some of the most used words in English. However, ungrammatical phrases such as “I went to store,” and “I like the English” show up in all levels of learner speech. In order to better understand the acquisition of articles, our research examined interviews with high proficiency Chinese learners of English. We transcribed all cases where articles could possibly occur and examined the environments in which speakers produced native-like uses of articles and when they do not. We compared this to data from the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English), which has a more stratified sample of learners at various levels of English ability. This allowed us to better understand the language acquisition process of a complex variable so that we can better help English learners to attain native-like fluency and improve their communication with native-speakers.