Doctoral Dissertation Research: An intervention study on the acquisition of articles by second language learners

Some languages use a part of speech called an article. For example, the definite article “the” and indefinite article “a/an” are the first and fifth most used words in the English language, respectively. Speakers of languages that do not have articles have great difficulty acquiring them in languages that do have articles, despite how frequently they may be exposed to articles in the second language input. As some of the most spoken first languages in the world do not have articles, this is an important puzzle worth addressing from both theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. This doctoral dissertation project combines application of language acquisition theory, psycholinguistic methods, and pedagogically-informed instruction and feedback to investigate a well-known, but unsolved, problem in second language acquisition research. Other benefits to society include an educational opportunity for training in second language acquisition research and the public distribution of resources for second language instruction. The definite article “the” can only be used if a noun names an entity which is unique and known to both the hearer and speaker; otherwise, “a” is used (with singular nouns). However, there is evidence that learners incorrectly use “the” when they instead intend to convey that the entity named by the noun is known to the speaker. This doctoral dissertation study builds on these prior findings by examining how article learning is influenced by the linguistic focus of instruction (about different properties of articles), as well as by the pedagogical focus (on language comprehension versus language production). Learners of English complete a six-week treatment that teaches them to pay attention to speaker versus hearer knowledge, or to uniqueness versus lack thereof. The two groups are further subdivided into subgroups whose instruction emphasizes language comprehension versus language production. The learners take a battery of tests that measure their explicit and implicit knowledge of English articles before and after the instructional intervention, as well as five months later (to measure long-term retention). The results of these experiments contribute to and expand the use of psycholinguistic methods in theoretical and applied second language acquisition research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.