“Using the properly”: L1 Transfer in the Acquisition of Definite Articles in English by Spanish speakers
Abstract
The study of L2 article acquisition has become an important area in the cross-linguistic field.
Articles have
been classified as one of the most difficult features in English, as
they are
employed very frequently in the language.
Recent research
has
investigated the
acquisition process of L2 ESL
learners
whose L1 contains articles in order to explore
the
possibilities of
L1
transfer
to the target language.
The
present
paper
aims at
proving
L1 transfer
from Spanish to English
by
analysing
the acquisition of
the
generic
and non-generic
definite article
the.
To this end,
transferring the
Spanish
article
semantics
into
English
would imply the better use of the article in non-generic contexts than in generic
ones.
The participants were
47
university students of the University of the Basque
Country
studying the English Studies Degree, half of them
being
first 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).
A
Cambridge
English Language Assessment
was given to them in order to test their level of
English
proficiency
more accurately.
The
instrument
was
based on 17
English sentences,
previously piloted by Liu & Gleason (2002),
in which
students
were asked
to place the
definite article
the
wherever they
deemed
appropriate.
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
the
encompasses. Finally, some pedagogical
implications were proposed so as to contribute to the better teaching of the English
definite articles to second language learners.