The Acquisition of English Articles by Chinese EFL College Students

Abstract

This paper reports the empirical consequences on the effect of cross-linguistic transfer in the acquisition of English articles by Chinese EFL college students. In contrast to English, Mandarin Chinese is an article-less language. Moreover, the two languages differ from each other in the denotation of semantic features such as definiteness, indefiniteness and genericity, etc. It remains unknown whether the cross-linguistic difference is transferable. To evaluate this possibility, the present study tested 20 English-learning Chinese college students in two experiments, respectively using a sentence completion task and a cloze task. The main findings were as follows across the two experiments. First, the participants performed better in the use of a/an than that of the. Second, a subset of the participants appeared to use bare NPs to denote genericity and singularity. Third, some participants had difficulty in the acquisition of genericity encoded by the and a/an. Fourth, some participants failed to tease apart the use of a and an. Taken together, the findings appear to support the Full Transfer Hypothesis. We discussed the implications of the findings in terms of cross-linguistic transfer theories.

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