ABSTRACT
The English article system is another important but very difficult aspect of grammar for ESL/EFL learners. English articles are important because they constitute a crucial part of the English system for information referencing and identification—a key function of language. Their importance is best evidenced by the fact that corpus data have repeatedly shown that the and a/an, key articles in English, are among the first few most frequent words in English: the is the most frequent word in both the one billion-word Oxford English Corpus and the 100 million-word BNC while a/an is the sixth and fourth most frequent word in the two corpora, respectively. The difficulty of learning the use of articles in ESL/EFL has been well reported in research (Liu & Gleason, 2002; Master, 1997). To address this important and challenging topic, this chapter begins with an overview of the English article system followed by a brief mention of some common practices for describing and teaching English articles. It concludes with a discussion of some practices for describing/teaching a few specific aspects of article use.
