(Download) "Is the Acquired Before Or After a?" by Southwest Journal of Linguistics # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Is the Acquired Before Or After a?
- Author : Southwest Journal of Linguistics
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 231 KB
Description
ABSTRACT. With the intent to examine the universality and applicability of a well-documented article acquisition sequence, this study investigated the acquisition of English articles by a 9-year-old beginning Chinese ESL learner in the American context. The longitudinal data collected during the 13 months of the study were first thoroughly indexed using NUD*IST 3.0.4d (QSR 1998), a computer software program for qualitative data analysis. The data were then statistically analyzed by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 6.1; see Nousis 1996). Brown's (1973) coding scheme, Pica's (1983) coding scheme, and a revised scheme were used in scoring the spoken data. Results showed that a was acquired before the. The findings from this study, on the one hand, challenge several claims documented in the current L2 research literature and on the other hand, provide new insight into the understanding of acquisition processes of English articles by Chinese ESL learners. ** INTRODUCTION. The English article is 'one of the notorious problem areas that foreign learners of the language are faced with' (Robberecht 1983:61). It has also been reported that the English article is the ESL teacher's toughest teaching problem (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman 1983). Quite ironically, articles 'are never taught to the native speakers of English because of their obviousness' (Kaluza 1981:7) in spite of the facts that a and the constitute two of the top five most frequently used words in the English language (Carroll, Davies & Richman 1971, Taylor & Taylor 1990) and that the English article system is a complex syntactic phenomenon from the linguistic point of view (Christophersen 1939, Chomsky 1962, Hewson 1972, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik 1985). Because of their frequent use, their complex syntactic nature, and their difficulty in second-language learning and teaching, English articles and their acquisition sequence have been the focus of a number of important second language acquisition studies (Bailey, Madden & Krashen 1974, Dulay & Burt 1974, Hakuta 1976, Huebner 1983, Parrish 1987, Master 1988, Thomas 1989, Chaudron & Parker 1990, Lee, Cameron, Linton & Hunt 1994). Research to date has consistently reported that the definite article the is acquired before a by ESL learners.
 "Is the Acquired Before Or After a?" by Southwest Journal of Linguistics # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}