Arab World EJ

Theoretical backgrounds
 A great amount of second language acquisition (SLA) research has reported that the
acquisition of the English article system (and article systems in other languages) is
problematic for learners of English as a second language (L2) or foreign language (FL),
especially for those learners whose first language (L1) lacks an article system or determiners
 Ionin (2003) and Ionin et al. (2004) report that two types of errors are commonly committed
by English language learners and repeatedly documented in SLA research: article omission
and article misuse or substitution;
 In their review of the literature on the acquisition of articles in L2 English, Zdorenko and
Paradis (2007, 2008) notice that adult L2-English learners omitted articles in both definite
and indefinite linguistic contexts (i.e., used bare nouns) and incorrectly substituted one
article in the context of another, especially the for a.
 Avery and Radišić (2007) group the sources of difficulty into three major areas: L1 influence,
Universal Grammar (UG), and L2 influence (or interference). On the other hand, White (2008)
attribute the article errors which L2 learners commit to problems with certain linguistic
representations, reporting syntactic, phonological, and semantic accounts
 The Article Choice Parameter (ACP) In order to account for the variability in the acquisition of
articles by L2-English learners, Ionin et al. (2004) propose a semantic parameter – the Article
Choice Parameter (henceforth ACP) with two settings as in the following formulation (Ionin
et al., 2004, p. 12): 4) The Article Choice Parameter (for two-article languages) A language
that has two articles distinguishes them as follows: The Definiteness Setting: Articles are
distinguished on the basis of definiteness. The Specificity Setting: Articles are distinguished
on the basis of specificity.
 According to Ionin and colleagues, a language, which has two articles, will have one value or
the other: specificity or definiteness. Ionin and colleagues argue that articles are
distinguished on the basis of one – and only one – of these two settings. English has only the
definiteness setting of the ACP. English uses the article the for definite nouns and the article
a for indefinite nouns regardless of specificity.
 The FH for L2 English article choice states, similar to the Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA)
hypothesis, that L2 learners have full UG access to the two settings of the ACP (definiteness
and specificity), and that L2 learners fluctuate between the two settings (hence, they would
go back and forth between the use of the and the use of a) until the input (once sufficient)
guides them to set this parameter to the target system value (i.e., definiteness for English).
 however, the FH predicts fluctuation in article choice for early L2 learners, especially when
their L1 lacks articles and L2 has them.
 Jaensch and Sarko (2009) examined the use of English articles by L1 Arabic learners of
English. Their results showed that the Arabic L2-English learners used the definite article the
very accurately in definite contexts, suggesting a transfer of the semantic feature
‘definiteness’ from their L1 (Arabic). However, the same learners fluctuated between the
definite article the and the indefinite article a in indefinite specific contexts, a pattern that
was not observed for the Japanese learners of L2 German in the same study.
 . The lower accuracy with the article use with indefinite nouns may be attributed to the fact
that Arabic, whether Standard Arabic or the vernaculars, does not mark indefinite nouns
morphologically.
 As shown in Table 4, this proficiency advantage was consistent throughout all semantic
contexts. In other words, the more proficient the participant was, the more accurate he/she
was in terms of the use of English articles regardless of the semantic context: ± definite, ±
specific.
 pointed out earlier, the high rates of article omission by the low proficiency and the
intermediate learners in the indefinite contexts may be attributed to the lack of a
morphological marker of indefinite nouns in Arabic. In other words, the high rate of article
omission errors in indefinite contexts by these learners suggests an L1 transfer, whereby the
learners transfer the absence of a morphological marker for indefinite singular nouns from
their L1 Arabic into their L2 English.

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Theoretical backgrounds

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