Neal Snape

Explicit Article Instruction in Definiteness, Specificity, Genericity and Perception

In our study, we focused on the nominal domain, as it is an area of persistent difficulty for Japanese learners of English. We administered pretests, instruction, and posttests to 14 participants. The instruction part covered three weeks of a 15-week semester. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: one instruction group (n = 7) and one control group (n = 7). The control group did not receive any instruction. The posttest was given at the end of the instruction period to both groups and again at the end of the semester. The instruction group received instruction about the properties of definiteness, specificity, and genericity. Learners were also given instruction on the perception of articles in spoken English. The results of our study show that despite the complexity of articles, learners did have a better understanding of specificity and their perception of the indefinite article in oral input improved. We discuss the implications of generative SLA research applied to the language classroom.

Ultimate Attainment of Second Language Articles: A Case Study of an Endstate Second Language Turkish-English Speaker

An area of considerable interest in second language (L2) acquisition is the difficulties learners face with the acquisition of articles. This article examines the role of prosody in the acquisition of articles by an endstate L2 English speaker focusing on the free morphemes the and a. In order to analyse the articles produced by a Turkish speaker named SD, we used the Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2006) phonetic analysis software to determine the prosodic shape of each article in article + noun configurations and article + adjective + noun configurations. The aim of the analysis is to see whether a more detailed analysis of the data would be fully consistent with the strong or weak interpretation of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis. The findings of our analysis show that SD produces a large percentage of stressed articles, which are non target-like. We discuss the implications of our analysis for the interlanguage representation of articles by SD as well as the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis.

The long-term effect of explicit instruction on learners’ knowledge on English articles:

This study examines the role of explicit instruction in article semantics to L2 learners of English. Two types of generic sentences, expressed by different articles, were tested over time. An instruction group (n = 21), a control group (n = 16) and a native English speaker control group (n = 9) participated in the study. The instruction group received nine 60-minute lessons across 9 weeks. A pre-test was administered to both groups before instruction began and four post-tests were given to both groups. The results from delayed post-tests show that the instruction group improved, but after one year little knowledge was retained. The findings suggest that explicit knowledge of articles is unlikely to be retained unless ongoing instruction is achieved.