The Primary Causes of Article Errors Made by Korean Advanced Learners of English

The Primary Causes of Article Errors Made by Korean Advanced Learners of English

  The major purpose of this study is to explore the primary causes of article errors made by advanced Korean EFL learners. The participants were forty-one college and graduate students. Immediately after completing a fill-in-the-article test, the students participated in an interview where they were asked to state the reasons for their article choice for every item on the test The qualitative analyses of the interview data revealed that misjudgments of referentiality and noun countability were the two major causes of the students" incorrect use of articles. The students had trouble understanding the hearer"s knowledge in a given context and judging referentiality especially when references were followed by postmodifiers. The students also had difficulties in judging countability of nouns/noun phrases when they are used in various contexts. Noun countability was found to be a big hurdle L2 advanced learners should jump over to master the English article system. Pedagogically, this study suggests that repeated article exercises involving various and large contexts will help advanced Korean EFL learners to learn how contextual factors determine referentiality and countability of nouns/noun phrases. (178)