most of esl students have trouble with the strongarticlesstrong.pdfVIP

International Education Journal, ERC2004 Special Issue, 2005, 5(5), 80-88. ISSN 1443-1475 © 2005 Shannon Research Press. 80 Most of ESL students have trouble with the articles Julia Miller Flinders University Student Learning Cler@.au The English article system presents many problems for non-native speakers of English, particularly when they do not have an equivalent structure in their first language. Different approaches to the teaching of articles have attempted to overcome this problem. By encouraging students to address the notion of countability and to identify specific uses of articles in English, the ESL teacher in this study was able to improve students’ understanding of this difficult area and guide them to a more accurate usage of the English article system. Articles, countability, definiteness, non-native speakers, teaching ESL INTRODUCTION In almost any piece of writing submitted by a non-native speaker of English, three things will often indicate that the writer is working in a second language: the choice of tense and aspect, the subject and verb agreements, and the use of articles (the, a, an). While verb problems can largely be overcome and the mistakes in agreements eliminated by careful proofreading, the problems with articles frequently remain. Since articles rank among the five most common words in the English language (Sinclair, 1991, cited in Master, 2002, p.332), errors in this area are highly noticeable to native speakers.