A PAPER ON ENGLISH ARTICLE ACCURACY OF EFL LEARNERS: AN INVESTIGATION

Abstract

In English grammar, English article system is considered as one of the difficult aspects. It is not only a subject of inquiry for linguists but also it is very much appealing for its wide variety. Article is an important topic because of its interactions with linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge. Warden (1976) has presented articles as "referring expressions" which enable a speaker to introduce or comment upon an item in a discourse. For the non-native English speakers, article becomes one of the major reasons to make grammatical error if they do not have any sound knowledge about it. For example in Bangla Language, there is no functional equivalent of English article. From the various kinds of resources, it is found that Bangladeshi learners always find it difficult to use articles properly; in fact in many cases they use wrong articles. Though there is high frequency of usage, English article system always remains a difficult part for them. In this paper, two important points are investigated; one is the ‘accuracy’ of the English articles (a, the, and Ø) and another one is the accuracy order of various semantic articles uses in different noun phrase (NP) environment