The present study is a computerized frequency-driven approach which focuses on the use of the definite article the by students in the Degree of English Studies at the University of Valencia. The objective of this research is twofold, first to explore and compare the frequency article-related errors made by students in their 1st and 3rd years and second, to identify the nature of the mentioned mistakes made by these EFL learners. The source of this investigation is the corpus of the research project CASTLE, made up of essays written by students on certain set tasks on a number of general topics selected from their textbooks. A total of 100 samples, each containing approximately 400 words, were compiled and analyzed by means of WordSmith Tools 6 (Scott 2012), both quantitatively and qualitatively. In this way, instances containing the article the were retrieved, taking into account the number of occurrences as well as its combination with adjacent words. The purpose was to recognize errors of usage, both in the omission of the article in a context where it should occur, and in its misuse including it in a sentence in which the zero article would be required. The basis for the present analysis was the set of 91 test-sentences in Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman (1999), which have been used in related works for the inspection of the English definite article (see Liu & Gleason 2002, García Mayo 2008, Isabelli-García & Slough 2012). A survey made up of 50 gaps to be filled with the definite article the or the zero article was used to determine the difficulties of the students on this grammatical aspect. To carry out the investigation, this study focused on the four categories of the article the proposed by Liu and Gleason (2002), to which the category “article overuse” was added. The results show that the degree of difficulty varies depending on the category of the articles and that students find Type 1 use of the article (cultural use of the according to Liu and Gleason’s proposal, 2002) particularly difficult. The present investigation proves that not only 1st year students but also 3rd year students need guidance and practice in order to make use of the definite article appropriately in their essays.
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corpus grammar teaching
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Salud Adelaida Flores Borjabad
Comentó el 10/12/2020 a las 13:06:03
Thank you so much for your presentation. I think it is very interesting. Do you know if this errors are common in other learners of English?
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Alicia Ricart
Comentó el 11/12/2020 a las 00:10:52
Dear Salud, thank you so much for your comments. Interestingly enough, I would love to carry out a contrastive research to find out, however, from my little experience, I detected that some students (probably from Sweden or Finland) also presented difficulty regarding the use of the article. However, in the case of these students, they presented the oposite problem, they underused the definite article, so it is an extremely interesting area of research. My hypothesis is that the L1 must have an enormous influence in the problems of the use of the article as it clearly interferes. Thank you for your question.
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Aitor Garcés-Manzanera
Comentó el 07/12/2020 a las 18:29:16
This is a very interesting piece of research. I do agree that the use of the article "the" along with other determiners is one of the stumbling blocks that English learners have to overcome to achieve mastery. I see that one of the gaps you mention is that there is little research concerning the use of "the" based on a corpus, and you are quite right. However, extensive research has been carried out on the benefits of providing learners with Written Corrective Feedback (WCF). A relatively recent piece of research that could be of interest for your future research is Stefanou & Révész (2015) (check this link: https://cutt.ly/fhQ42Rh).
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Alicia Ricart
Comentó el 11/12/2020 a las 00:13:54
Dear Aitor, thank you so much for your observations. I am extremely curious and interested in finding out about WCF. Thank you also so much for the link and bibliography. Hope this helps me with my research. Thanks a million!
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Silvia Helena Benchimol Barros
Comentó el 07/12/2020 a las 15:34:07
Dear Professor Ricart, I really liked your research. Actually, I am a native speaker of Portuguese language and Professor of the English language and I usually face the same situations of misuse concerning article “the” by the students. I am especially concerned with error “Type Five” (overuse). I’m convinced this has a lot to do with language transfer and the excess of definite articles employed by Portuguese language speakers. My question is… do you recommend any kind of pedagogical procedure as to reduce the incidence of overusing article “the”? ( I could’t find the exercises on the project webpage)
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Alicia Ricart
Comentó el 11/12/2020 a las 00:23:02
Dear Silvia,
please find the links for the exercises on the platform below. As for the pedagogical procedures, the only thing I have been trying myself is providing them with the platform exercises and also asking them to write essays, as the mistakes come over and over again, getting them corrected is quite effective, as you know, practice makes perfect! I imagine Portuguese and Spanish students must share this grammatical problem as the languages seem to be alike. However, I do not know your language, but it's been beautiful to get this information from you. Thanks a million.
https://www.uv.es/anglotic/grammar/definite_article/the_definite_article_truefalse_questions.html
https://www.uv.es/anglotic/grammar/definite_article/
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