“Using the properly”: L1 Transfer in the Acquisition of Definite Articles in English by Spanish speakers

摘要

The study of L2 article acquisition has become an important area in the cross-linguistic field. Articles havebeen classified as one of the most difficult features in English, as they areemployed very frequently in the language.Recent researchhas investigated the acquisition process of L2 ESLlearnerswhose L1 contains articles in order to explore the possibilities of L1transferto the target language. Thepresentpaperaims atprovingL1 transfer from Spanish to English by analysingthe acquisition of the genericand non-genericdefinite article the. To this end, transferring theSpanisharticle semanticsinto Englishwould imply the better use of the article in non-generic contexts than in generic ones.The participants were 47university students of the University of the Basque Countrystudying the English Studies Degree, half of them beingfirst year students, and the other half third year students. Moreover, 31 of the participants had Spanish as their native language, while the remaining 16 were bilingual (Spanish/Basque).ACambridge English Language Assessment was given to them in order to test their level of English proficiencymore accurately.Theinstrumentwasbased on 17English sentences, previously piloted by Liu & Gleason (2002),in which studentswere askedto place the definite article thewherever they deemedappropriate.The analysis did not show L1 transfer, as the major rate of errors occurred in non-generic contexts, mostly in structural positions. Nevertheless,the number of errors among the participants appeared to decrease as their level of proficiency increased,as previously predicted.In conclusion, yet transfer was not demonstrated in this dissertation,it was proven that learners of the language with high levels of proficiency still appear to ignore the different uses the definite article theencompasses. Finally, some pedagogical implications were proposed so as to contribute to the better teaching of the English definite articles to second language learners.