The Effect of Translated Writing Method on Learning Article Differences for EFL Learners

The English articles are one of the most difficult structure for EFL learners to acquire. Korean language has no articles to acquire and the system of adding an article to a sentence remains to be a burden. This research paper examined whether the proficiency level had any affect on the students’ use of the translation method to acquire the article differences. Studies show that student’s who made fewer article errors showed higher motivation to see the differences between the articles when using the translation method. However, as they already acquired the use of English articles, they were not willing to use the translation method for future learning. Results show that the lower the scores were, the more they thought the translation method would be helpful. However, the translation examples showed that students at the low proficiency level had a low completion rate. They often did not even attempt to translate passages with longer discourses. This indicates that students who had no prior knowledge of aticles would have had more difficulties of completing the translation task. It could be advisable to each the low level students about the articles and then provide the translation method to exercise the article differences rather than starting from scratch. Moreover, student’s sample surveys indicated that only including low level students who attempted all the translation could reveal more meaningful findings.