Influence of native language and general English proficiency on the use of articles in English

Second language learners face a great difficulty in the use of English articles since their native language does not have an article system which is similar to the target language they learn. Turkish is one of the languages which have an article system marking the semantic features ‘definiteness’ or ‘specificity’ in different ways. It encodes these features by using case morphology, word order, stress and tense-aspect modality. The former included 20 test-sentences assessing the production of English articles in terms of definiteness and specificity, whereas the latter had 20 blanks measuring the proficiency of learners. Thirty five English major students attending a university in Turkey participated in the study. Following the data collection, the data were analysed to find out the effect of the learners’ native language as well as their general English proficiency on the production of English articles.