Some Challenge with Articles- Adnan
Posted by aalhammody on May 28, 2013
Hi everybody,
One of my classes for the same class of middle schollers was about explaining the definite and indefinite articles. I just would like to share how challenging this class was. The difficulty comes mostly from the L1 interference. In Arabic, we use the definite article a lot. Plus, there are many situations where in English, for example, we have to put “the” while in Arabic zero article is needed or the indifinite “a”. Personllay speaking, I still sometimes pause for a while to check the use of articles in English. It is confusing for L2 learners. So it was a little challenging to explain it to young learners. They were sometimes translating the sentence from Arabic into English in their minds, but it didn’t work. So I had to explain the use of each in detail in Enlglish. I also pointed out soem exceptions, for example using “the” before “United States” though it is a proper noun. Also, I explained some issues as far as phonology is concerned. For example, we have to say “an hour” not ” a hour” because the “h” is not pronounced.
May 30th, 2013 at 8:45 am
Adnan, I had the similar experience when I was teaching articles a few years ago in Korea. First, the problem here is that Korean doesn’t have articles at all; the concept of using articles is totally new to us. So, many English learners including me find it difficult to use proper articles when they use English. Then tend to skip articles frequently or of course use them incorrectly. And another problem is that English articles have too many exceptions. 🙁 When I teach, I start from the general rules of when to use a/ the/ zero article, but soon I have to teach my students many exceptions to memorize because they don’t fit into this category, which can often discourage the learners from learning English. I also remember that when I asked a few proficient native teachers about this issue (who was teaching in Korea), they express their difficulty teaching articles as well.