The acquisition of articles in English by Arabic EFL learners

This study looks at the acquisition of English articles (the, a/an) by L1 Arabic learners of English as a Foreign language (EFL) to examine whether L1 Arabic learners with a definiteness-based L1 transfer L1 parameter or fluctuate between the definiteness and the specificity settings of the article choice parameter (ACP). If they fluctuate, then, within the L1 Arabic group, the fluctuation effect should be less robust in the intermediate group than in the beginner one, given the latter group's lower English proficiency. Arabic and English are article-based languages and overtly mark definiteness, however, they differ in overt morphology that marks indefiniteness. Arabic has a phonologically overt definite article al which is a bound morpheme, prefixed and attached to the noun it defines, but it does not have a phonologically overt indefinite article. We tested a group of Arabic-speaking EFL learners and native English speakers on two written production tasks: a forced choice-elicitation task (FCET) and a picture-description task. The FCET involved 36 experimental dialogues in four contexts, each of which had 9 dialogues: [+definite, -specific], [-definite, -specific], [-definite, +specific] and [+definite, +specific] singular object noun phrases (NPs). The picture description task, on the other hand, required subjects to provide a written description of five pictures involving a short story in which definite and indefinite articles are used with singular NPs. The results obtained from the FCET indicate that L1 Arabic EFL learners are almost as successful as native English speakers in using definite article 'the' in [+def, + spec] and [+def, - spec] contexts and indefinite article 'a' in [-definite, -specific] context. However, they were significantly less accurate than the native English speakers in providing indefinite article 'a' in [-def, +spec] context. Results from error analysis indicate that L1 Arabic- EFL learners have more substitution errors than omission errors in the [-def, +spec] context. Results from proficiency test reveal that the intermediate group is slightly better than the elementary group in all contexts including [-def, +spec] context. Results from the picture description task are in line with the findings of the FCET. These results show that adult EFL learners regardless of their L1 background experience fluctuation between the two settings of the ACP at the initial stage of L2 acquisition of articles and suggest that fluctuation is a developmental process (Zdorenko & Paradis, 2008) rather than a transfer from the L1. Keywords: Articles, definiteness, specificity, fluctuation L1 Arabic, EFL, English