By Jono Ryan - Head of Materials Development
You can tell a lot about who a teacher is and where they’ve worked by their attitude towards understanding the article system. If their students are primarily from another European-language background, it may be that articles have never appeared troublesome, and the teacher might just assume that the rules – whatever they are – are probably quite simple and intuitive. After all, articles in Spanish and Dutch are much the same as their equivalents in English. If, however, their students are mostly from northeast Asia, they may have noticed that article errors remain one of the most persistent and noticeable problems, even for students at advanced levels.
Of course, some teachers barely give the issue much thought, throwing up their hands in frustration and blaming the ‘careless’ student. I even remember one teacher loudly insisting that a particular student couldn’t possibly move up from his Elementary class because he still made errors with his articles. Poor student.
Other teachers – and I fall firmly into this category – become a bit obsessed with working out the key principles. Hence the large number of PhD and Masters projects focusing on article errors. How does the article system work? Where do the troubles lie? These questions take a while to get your head around. For the 620 world languages in one survey, just over a third had a word equivalent to the, a third had neither a definite or indefinite article, and a third employed other options such as definite affixes, demonstratives, or only indefinite articles (Dryer, 2013). The main issue, however, is probably the abstract and very subtle nature of definiteness and its underlying semantic or pragmatic principles (see, for example, Abbott, 2004).
The challenge for the teacher, then, is to help learners come to grips with a system whose rules are complex and subtle and perhaps completely alien to their first language, and yet which they need to apply in almost any English utterance. As I was grappling with this some years ago, I bought three teaching guides to the English articles – books by Roger Berry (1993), Elizabeth Claire (1998) and Tom Cole (2000). Cole presents an extraordinary 50 rules and 15 exceptions to account for a, an and the. You can imagine the cognitive load of a poor language learner trying to figure out which one to use in the course of a conversation.
I haven’t yet reached a firm conclusion on the best way to teach the articles, but there are a few grammatical and semantic concepts that I believe provide a useful foundation for building an understanding of how the system works. We’ve produced a series of brief videos for learners to explain some of these points. At some stage, we may follow up with some further tips.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwDjBVkhHF9dNZYCIh3wm5nHHw6B7Cd6t
Take a look and if you have further suggestions, please feel free to get in contact and let us know your thoughts.
References
Abbott, B. (2004). Definiteness and indefiniteness. In L. R. H. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 122-149). Blackwell. http://www.msu.edu/~abbottb/def_and_indef.pdf
Berry, R. (1993). Collins cobuild English guides 3: Articles. Harper Collins.
Claire, E. (1998). Three little words: A, an and the. Delta Systems.
Cole, T. (2000). The article book: Practice toward mastering a, an and the (Revised ed.). University of Michigan Press.
Dryer, M. S. (2013). Definite articles. In M. S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.