한국인 초등 영어 학습자들의 관사 학습 실태 연구

How English articles are built in Korean elementary L2 learners.

This study focuses on analyzing the English article system built in elementary school students who are learning English as a second language and also aims to analyze how the English article system is being learned among 4th to 6th grade students in elementary school who never learned English articles specifically in the public curriculum. The structure and findings of this study are as follows: first, the English articles are categorized into definite articles, indefinite articles, and zero articles (omission of articles). The articles are not further branched out in terms of genericity and specificity. Second, students show a high percentage of correct answers in the order of indefinite, definite, and zero articles. On the other hand, after unstructured interviews with the students for a qualitative analysis, it is revealed that the correct answers are not elicited from the understanding of rules associated with the indefinite articles. Rather, it is a result of repeated exposure to the passages in the textbook. In the case of zero articles, students do recognize city or country names as proper nouns, so as the students‘ grade level increases, the higher percentage of correct answer they yield. On the contrary, with other articles they show a variety of errors, which calls on the systematic instructions. This study has its own limitations in that, to measure their level of acquisition, it does not provide new contexts for students but just analyzes the learning of the rules based on the cloze test results. Therefore, it calls for a future study on the order of article acquisition.