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theses

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), it has been documented that the mastery of the English article system by English language learners (ELLs) is a challenging task. To understand the ways in which ELLs acquire the use of articles and the underlying causes of the difficulties associated with this particular feature, a comprehensive study was conducted on Korean L2 speakers with the purpose of understanding implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles. The study was informed by several theoretical frameworks in SLA and sociolinguistics, and thus employed a mixed-method approach to its analysis to address the following questions: 1. What patterns in the use of articles are evidenced in Korean L2 speakers of English at distinct levels of English language proficiency? 2. How are these patterns distinct in speaking and writing? 3. What kinds of metalinguistic awareness do Korean L2 speakers of English have at different English language proficiency levels? 4. How are hypotheses about the use of English articles of Korean speakers of English different from those of native English speakers? 5. How are Korean L2 English speakers’ hypotheses about English articles operationalized in their speech? Four tasks were performed by 30 Korean learners of English from three different proficiency levels: oral and written narratives, grammaticality judgment tasks, and think-aloud tasks. In addition, five native English speakers (NES) undertook the grammaticality judgment task and the think-aloud task to serve as a comparative basis. The study revealed that article use varied not only according to the external variable of language proficiency but also with respect to several linguistic variables such as NP contexts in which a noun phrase contained an adjective. In addition, the study found that articles were generally produced with higher rates of accuracy in writing rather than in speech. With regard to the explicit knowledge of English articles, the results of the think-aloud protocol suggest that ELLs may gradually acquire the manner in which nominal entities are constructed with regard to countability and definiteness and that learners are able to incrementally understand how the use of articles is conditioned by semantic, pragmatic, and contextual features. The study also addresses several pedagogical implications regarding how articles are understood by learners whose first languages do not have a similar article system and how article instruction needs to focus on the pragmatic, semantic, and contextual features.

ETD_4403

Ed.D.

Includes bibliographical references

By Juyeon Lee

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001500001.ETD.000067516

doi:10.7282/T30C4TH2

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.