Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics

Research Article

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English Articles Definiteness and Specificity: A Corpus-based Study of Greek Learners’ Writing

Evangelos Chatzipanagiotidis

The University of Sheffield International Faculty, City College

Mailing address: 32 Kapetan Foufa Str., 50200, Ptolemaida, Greece

Email: echatzipanagiotidis@gmail.com

Published online: 7 July 2018, pp. 42-51

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​​​Citation: Chatzipanagiotidis, E. (2018). English Articles Definiteness and Specificity: A Corpus-based Study of Greek Learners’ Writing. Journal of Applied Languages and Linguistics, 1(1), pp.42-51

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Abstract

Research on the field of Second Language Acquisition suggests that the age and linguistic background of learners affect the language learning process and outcome (Hawkins et al., 2006). The current study examines the English article use in terms of definiteness and specificity in the writings produced by Greek learners of English. As the issue of articles in the production of young Greek learners has attracted little attention, the objective of the research is to gain a better understanding of the difficulties that learners might have and to provide evidence that can be of use to EFL teachers. A Do-It-Yourself (DIY) corpus was generated and was compiled of different types of writings, all produced by young Greek learners while the AntConc concordancer was the tool adopted for the qualitative analysis. The findings suggest that the knowledge of a language (i.e. Greek) with the article system encoding definiteness helps learners to be accurate in their English article choice while in the cases of misuse the indefinite article predominates.

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Keywords: English articles, definiteness, specificity, young learners