The Acquisition of English Articles by Second Language Learners

Despite the numerous studies on English article acquisition, theacquisition sequence, differences, and difficulties by English-as-a-second languagelearners (ELLs) remain to be further explored. With a detailed literature review, thisstudy investigated the acquisition sequence, differences, and difficulties of Englisharticles by ELLs with diverse first language backgrounds. Eighteen college ELLsparticipated in the study. Data were collected through cloze exercises. The results,through the analysis of its database of 6,178 article used, indicated that “zeroarticle” was the last to be acquired while article “a” is the first to be acquired;positive correspondence existed between the growth of the acquisition of article “a/an,”“the,” and “zero” between “+Art” (with article system) group and “−Art” (without articlesystem) group. The results also revealed that (a) the most difficult article forparticipants in both groups to acquire was “zero article,” (b) “the” was the mostdifficult article for participants in “+Art” group, and (c) “a” was the easiest oneacquired by both groups. These findings, in fact, challenge the commonsense belief that“+Art” ELLs acquired English articles faster than “−Art” ELLs and that when twolanguages were similar, positive transfer would occur