How Definite Are We About the English Article System? Chinese Learners, L1 Interference and the Teaching of Articles in English for Academic Purposes Programmes
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HOW DEFINITE ARE WE ABOUT THE ENGLISH ARTICLE SYSTEM? CHINESE LEARNERS, L1 INTERFERENCE AND THE TEACHING OF ARTICLES IN ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES PROGRAMMES. By RICHARD NICKALLS A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham December 2019 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT Omission and overspecification of the/a/an/Ø are among the most frequently occurring grammatical errors made in English academic writing by Chinese first language (L1) university students (Chuang & Nesi, 2006; Lee & Chen, 2009). However, in the context of competing demands in the English for academic purposes (EAP) syllabus and conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of error correction, EAP tutors are often unsure about whether article use should or could be a focus and whether such errors should be corrected or ignored. With the aim of informing pedagogy, this study investigates: whether explicit teaching or correction improves accuracy; which article uses present the most challenges for Chinese students; the causes of error and whether a focus on article form can be integrated within a modern genre based/student centred approach in EAP. First, a questionnaire survey investigates how EAP teachers in higher education explicitly teach or correct English article use. Second, the effect of explicit teaching and correction on English article accuracy is investigated in a longitudinal experiment with a control group. Analysis of this study’s post-study measures raise questions about the sustained benefits of written correction or decontextualised rule-based approaches. Third, findings are presented from a corpus-based study which includes an inductive and deductive analysis of the errors made by Chinese students. Finally, in a fourth study hypotheses are tested using a multiple-choice test (n=455) and the main findings are presented: 1) that general referential article accuracy is significantly affected by proficiency level, genre and students’ familiarity with the topic; 2) Chinese students are most challenged by generic and non-referential contexts of use which may be partly attributable to the lack of positive L1 transfer effects; 3) overspecification of definite articles is a frequent problem that sometimes gives Chinese B2 level students’ writing an ‘informal tone’; and 4) higher nominal density of pre-qualified noun phrases in academic writing is significantly associated with higher error rates. Several practical recommendations are presented which integrate an occasional focus on article form with whole text teaching, autonomous proofreading skills, register awareness, and genre-based approaches to EAP pedagogy. DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated: To my loving family, past and present. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At the University of Birmingham, I am profoundly grateful to Professor Jeannette Littlemore and Dr. Nicholas Groom for helping me through my Masters and then later supervising me at Doctoral level. My thesis (perhaps even more so than most) has ended up a long way from where we started (the proposal they agreed to supervise) and I’m very grateful for their tolerance and continued interest. I need to express my sincere gratitude to the many students who have participated in various studies and my many colleagues who have contributed to this research. There’s too little space to mention every single academic, student and colleague who has generously helped me or simply exchanged ideas on this rather dry topic – but they know who they are. A special thanks to Jane Sjoberg and my nephew Oliver for checking my thesis for typos and inconsistencies. Thanks to Dr. Oliver Mason for use of his Java-based programme to extract noun phrases and to Dr. Laurence Anthony of Waseda University for programming (and regularly updating) the freely available Ant. Conc. Programme. For help in understanding aspects of the Chinese language I must finally thank Zhijun Wang, Shimeng Liu and Xinyu Li. Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Brief overview ........................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Personal interest ...................................................................................................... 2 1.3 Background and justification for the research .......................................................... 4 1.4 Previous Research into Chinese L1 learners’ English article accuracy ..................... 8 1.5 Summary of research aims .................................................................................... 10 1.6 Thesis overview .................................................................................................... 11 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................ 15 2.1 Key term definitions.............................................................................................. 15 2.2 The English article system .................................................................................... 17 2.3 Contrastive Analysis ............................................................................................. 26 2.4 Empirical research into Chinese L1 learners’ written L2 English errors ................. 32 2.5 Other factors influencing English Accuracy .......................................................... 41 2.6 English articles within the current EAP pedagogical paradigms............................. 49 2.7 Empirical research into the effect of teaching and correcting articles ..................... 52 2.8 Research Questions ............................................................................................... 55 i ii 3 METHODOLOGY ...................................................................................................... 59 3.1 Critical methodological issues in Error Analysis ................................................... 59 3.2 Error detection ...................................................................................................... 62 3.3 Error classification ................................................................................................ 65 3.4 Error explanation .................................................................................................. 66 3.5 Evaluation of recent methods in English article studies ......................................... 67 3.6 The need for a preliminary study ........................................................................... 75 3.7 Preliminary study .................................................................................................. 76 3.8 Summary of methodological approaches in main studies ....................................... 84 3.9 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 85 4 SURVEY OF TEACHER ATTTITUDES AND PRACTICES .................................... 87 4.1 Background and recap of Research Question 1 ...................................................... 88 4.2 Methodology ......................................................................................................... 91 4.3 Results and Discussion .......................................................................................... 96 4.4 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 122 iii iv 5 LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF TEACHING/ CORRECTION ON 24 (L1 MANDARIN) LEARNERS OF ENGLISH ON A 15-WEEK PRESESSIONAL ENGLISH COURSE .......................................................................................................................... 127 5.1 Study overview ................................................................................................... 128 5.2 Methodology ....................................................................................................... 129 5.3 Ethical issues ...................................................................................................... 143 5.4 Constraints of the study ....................................................................................... 145 5.5 Data analysis ....................................................................................................... 145 5.6 Tagging reliability checks and inter-rater reliability checks ................................. 151 5.7 Results and discussion......................................................................................... 154 5.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 172 6 CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF CORPORA .........................................................