Korean ESL Students’ Use of English Definite Articles

Misuse of English articles is a very common error among ESL students. If a student’s first language does not contain an article, learning a second language that has an article system will prove to be very difficult. Korean is an example of a language that does not contain articles, but instead relies heavily on the context of the sentence, as well as determiners to indicate definiteness and specificity. In order to understand how students learn and acquire English articles, a basic understanding is needed of Language Acquisition and theories of Second Language Acquisition. These explanations are continued through various literature reviews and studies. To further emphasize the common mistakes of the definite article by Korean students, research is carried out based on six high school ESL students and their personal journal entries for their ESL class. It is predicted that omission of the definite article is very common among Korean ESL students based on other studies, and this hypothesis is borne out. Suggestions for further research are discussed, as well as pedagogical implications of this topic for ESL teachers. USE OF DEFINITE ARTICLES 4 Korean ESL Students’ Use of English Definite Articles ESL teachers cannot effectively teach until they fully understand the background knowledge, first languages, and cultural differences of their students. One topic that has been of particular interest in recent years is the English article system. While some languages have articles, many languages do not determine object definiteness or indefiniteness based on an article system. Rather, definiteness or the lack of it is based solely on the context of the conversation or writing. Korean is an example of such a language. Due to the lack of an article system in Korean, definiteness and specificity of an object are determined by word order, context, and demonstratives. Because of this linguistic diversity, Korean ESL students face great obstacles when learning and acquiring the English article system. Furthermore, due to the differences between Korean and English when discussing definiteness, Korean ESL students have been found to transfer certain characteristics of their first language to the target language. To better understand such difficulties, a focus needs to first be made on second language acquisition (SLA), as well as the differences between SLA and first language acquisition. In the context of second language acquisition, the topic of linguistic transfer will be the focus for the remainder of the studies and discussion. Certain characteristics of Korean will be compared to English articles to better understand the linguistic differences and the possibility of first language transfer. The English definite article will then be considered in great detail according to its various subcategories and uses, and the way in which Korean ESL students acquire and sometimes misuse the definite article will be examined through past research. Informal research will then be discussed to further the USE OF DEFINITE ARTICLES 5 results that have been found in various studies and literature reviews. Specifically, it has been found that when acquiring English as a second language, omission of the English definite article is one of the most common article mistakes among Korean ESL students due to the influence of Korean and its lack of an article system. The Korean Language For Korean students, it is very difficult to learn the usage of articles in English, because such a system has no equivalent in their native language. Korean students are accustomed to understanding definiteness according to context, word order, and demonstratives, not according to articles. English article acquisition studies have shown that the omission of appropriate articles is one of the most common mistakes for Korean ESL learners (Myers, 1992). Korean sentences can be interpreted several different ways, and the only way to fully understand the meaning is to understand the context in which the sentence is being used, for example: Na-nun ecey tosekwan-eyse chayk-ul pilli-ess-ta. I-TOP yesterday library-from book-OCC check out-PAST-DEC “I checked out a/the book (or books) from a/the library (or libraries)” (Kim & Lakshmanan, 2008) In this sentence, chayk, meaning ‘book,’ can be interpreted four different ways. It could refer to ‘a book,’ ‘the book,’ ‘books,’ or ‘the books’ (Kim & Lakshmanan, 2008). The noun, tosekwan, meaning ‘library,’ can also be interpreted as an indefinite singular, definite singular, indefinite plural, or a definite plural noun. The interpretation is often entirely based on the context of the conversation. In the following sentence, this can be seen as well: USE OF DEFINITE ARTICLES 6 taum-nal oriŋ-nun taʃi hakjo-ro tora-wa-t-ta next-day we-TOP again school-to back-come-PST-DECL “The next day, we came back to school. ” (Morrett, 2010) “Next day” is not used with ‘the’, as is grammatically correct in English, but instead the zero article was used (in other words, ‘the’ was omitted). There is a Korean case marker that can be dropped in certain situations (Kim & Lakshmanan, 2008). However, in contrast with other languages such as Turkish, the Korean “accusative case marker does not appear to be associated with specificity” (p.