THE ACQUISITION OF SECOND LANGUAGE GRAMMAR: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF PERSIAN AND ENGLISH ARTICLES
Keywords:
Definite and indefinite articles, Persian EFL learners, omission, misuseAbstract
This study is an attempt to investigate whether Persian learners of English are able to utilize English definite and indefinite articles accurately especially the definite article “the”. Moreover, this research specifically aims to explore the degree to which Persian learners of English have problems concerning English definite article as it is based upon the contrastive anlysis of aforementioned languages. According to this paper, Iranian upper-intermediate EFL learners, in the case of English indefinite articles, demonstrated remarkable mastery, nevertheless, they came across various problems in the use of English definite article “the”. In order to collect data, two questionnaires (both in English and Persian) were given to the subjects. The final statistical analyses of language learners’ performance were as follows: First, English and Persian items were analyzed, then both of them were compared with one another and finally their competence/proficiency levels were compared. The results of this study showed that a considerable difference was observed among language learners in terms of their proficiency levels regarding the correct use of definite article “the” in English samples. Furthermore, it turned out that unlike the high number of article errors, Persian EFL learners mostly misused the articles rather than omit them.
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References
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