Teaching and Learning Articles in ESL

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Chandler, Anne

• English article use is one of the most difficult aspects of English grammar for both teachers and learners of English as a second language (ESL). A teacher in Yamada and Matsuura’s (1982) study claimed that his students used articles “almost randomly” (p. 50) while some researchers (e.g., Dulay, Burt & Krashen, 1982; Swan, 2005) are convinced that the attempt to teach articles to ESL learners is a futile one. However, Master (1990, 2002) maintains that English article use has a system that is both teachable and learnable. He and other researchers (e.g., Butler, 2002; White, 2009, 2010) have proposed various pedagogical approaches for the teaching and learning of the English article system in ESL. In this paper I link research on English articles and English article acquisition to ESL pedagogy. I outline the form, meaning, and use characteristics of English articles, the difficulties associated with their acquisition, and guidelines suggested by the experts for teaching the article system to ESL students.

• Date created

  2014-04-21

• Subjects / Keywords

  • English as a second language
  • Language Acquisition
  • English language learning
  • English article acquisition
  • Article use

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3ZS2KH1G

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International