Common errors in the use of english articles by vietnamese third year english major students at an giang university submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of te

  PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN COMMON ERRORS IN THE USE OF ENGLISH ARTICLES BY VIETNAMESE THIRD-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY M.A.. I certify my authorship of the th

  

PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN

COMMON ERRORS IN THE USE OF ENGLISH ARTICLES

BY VIETNAMESE THIRD-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS

AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY

M.A THESIS

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS IN TESOL

Supervisor Assoc Prof., PhD ĐINH ĐIỀN

HO CHI MINH CITY, 2010

I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:

COMMON ERRORS IN THE USE OF ENGLISH ARTICLES

BY VIETNAMESE THIRD-YEAR ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS

AT AN GIANG UNIVERSITY

in terms of the statement of Requirements for theses

in Master’s Programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree

or diploma in any other institution

Ho Chi Minh City, 2010

PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN

I hereby state that I, PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN, being the candidate for the degree of Master of Arts (TESOL), accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses

Ho Chi Minh City, 2010

PHAN THỊ MINH TUYỀN

I am deeply indebted to a number of people for helping to make this MA thesis possible First and foremost, my deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Associate Professor Dr Dinh Dien for his insightful comments, invaluable suggestions and a great encouragement during the process I conducted the thesis

I would also like to express my special thanks to Dr To Minh Thanh, my teacher at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, for her useful suggestions

on my thesis proposal

Next, my appreciation is also extended to the Vietnamese teachers and students who participated in my study Their help is highly appreciated I would also like to thank the English Department of An Giang University for providing the most favorable conditions which made my study possible

Last but not least, I would like to thank my family and friends for their great support and willing assistance in completing this work

This study was intended to investigate common errors in the use of English articles made by the third-year English major students at An Giang University in order

to enhance the effectiveness of EFL teaching and learning in Vietnam in general and teaching and learning English article system in particular The participants in the study consisted of 44 third-year English major students at An Giang University The data were collected via writing essays which aimed to identify common article errors, determine the frequency of the article errors in comparison with other types of errors

A fill-in-the-blank test was also employed to get more information about the particular types of article errors made and explain the reasons which the students finally arrived

at their choices of articles In addition, a pretest-posttest comparison group design was conducted to confirm the effectiveness of using corpus-based analysis in helping students overcome their problems of acquiring the English articles Both quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to answer three research questions concerning three areas: (1) common article errors in the writing essays made by the Vietnamese third-year English-major students at AGU, (2) difficulties of acquiring the semantic notions

of the English articles, and (3) the effectiveness of applying corpus-based analysis in helping students overcome their problems

The findings showed that the English majors made different types of errors and among them the English articles were found their most concerning problems The students tended to make more errors relating contextual choices such as unique types, maximal instances, and actual instances, non-definite actual instances, and specificity with definite and count with non-count nouns The study also found out the effectiveness of teaching and learning the English articles with the use of corpus-based analysis The results showed that the treatment group did better the control group after

the experiment, especially in using zero and zero in maximal set environments These

the English articles in order to be confident and become professional writers

Table 1.1 COBUILD list of the ten most frequent words in English 1

Table 1.2 Percentage of occurrence of the articles in the five genres 2

Table 2.1 Quirk et al.’s classification of nouns 11

Table 4.1 Types and descriptions of errors 34

Table 4.2 Frequency of different categories of errors in essays 35

Table 4.3 Environments for the occurrence of the articles 36

Table 4.6 Group statistics 42

Table 4.7 Group performance at six NP environments in Post Test 1 43

Table 4.8 Group performance at six NP environments in Post Test 2 44

Figure 1 Main entries for agree from the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s

Dictionary (CD-ROM 2003) 20 Figure 2 Sample of concordance lines for agree from the PolyU Language

Bank Concordancer 20

Certificate of originality i

Retention and use of the thesis ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract iv

List of tables vi

List of figures vii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Background to the Study 1

1.2 Statement of Purpose 4

1.3 Research Questions 4

1.4 Scope of the Study 4

1.5 Significance of the Study 5

1.6 Methodology 5

1.6.1 The participants of the Study 5

1.6.2 Data collection instruments 6

1.6.3 Procedures of the Study 6

1.7 Assumptions 7

1.8 Overview of the Study 8

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 9

2.1 Articles 9

2.1.1 Definition of articles 9

2.2.1 Classification of nouns proposed by Quirk at al (1985) 11

2.2.2 Classification of nouns proposed by Langacker (1991) 12

2.2.3 The suggested classification of the article environments 13

2.3 Acquisition of the English articles by Vietnamese learners 14

2.3.1 Definite articles 14

2.3.2 Indefinite articles 15

2.4 Corpora and the application of corpus-based analyses in language teaching and learning 17

2.4.1 What is a corpus? 17

2.4.1.1 A corpus is a principled collection of texts 18

2.4.1.2 A corpus is a collection of electronic texts 18

2.4.1.3 A corpus is available for qualitative and quantitative analysis 19

2.4.1.4 Which corpus, what for and what size? 19

2.4.2 Overview of existing corpora 21

2.4.3 Types of corpora 22

2.4.4 Corpus use in Vietnam 23

2.4.5 Applying corpus-based analyses to teaching 24

2.4.5.1 Syllabus design 24

2.4.5.2 Materials development 24

3.1 Research questions and hypotheses 26

3.1.1 Research questions 26

3.1.2 Hypotheses 26

3.2 Research design 27

3.2.1 Participants 27

3.2.2 Data collection instruments 27

3.2.2.1 The writing essay 27

3.2.2.2 The fill in the blank test 28

3.2.2.3 A pretest-posttest comparison group design 29

3.3 Summary 32

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 33

4.1 Data analysis and results of the writing essay 33

4.1.1 Classification of article errors and other type of errors 33

4.1.2 Data analysis 34

4.1.3 Discussion 35

4.2 Data analysis and results of the fill in the blank test 35

4.2.1 Some explanations relating to zero vs null and a 35

4.2.2 Data analysis 38

4.2.3 Discussion about causes of errors 40

4.2.3.1 Names 40

4.2.3.4 Actual instance 41

4.2.4 Summary 41

4.3 Data results of the pretest-posttest group design 42

CHAPTER 5: SUMMARY AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 45

5.1 Summary of the findings 45

5.2 Pedagogical implications 46

5.3 Limitations of the study 48

5.4 Suggestions for further research 49

BIBLIOGRAPHY 51

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Appendix 1B A graded essay 60

Appendix 2 Article error analysis test 61

Appendix 3 Pretest 1 on the English articles 65

Appendix 4 Pretest 2 on the English articles 68

Appendix 5 Post-test 1 on the English articles 71

Appendix 6 Post-test 2 on the English articles 75

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

The first chapter begins with the background of the research The next section, section 1.2, addresses the research purposes, followed by section 1.3 stating the research questions In addition, the chapter also presents the limits of the scope of the study, the significance, methodology and outlines the structure of the thesis

In the process of learning English, the mastery of English articles has often been considered as one of the elementary lessons Though English articles are so-called

‘little words’, they play a very important role They occur very frequently and signal about how the structure of a sentence is to be interpreted Therefore, incorrect use of English articles may affect communication negatively

In the COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) list of the ten most frequent words in English (Sinclair, 1991), the English specific deictic terms such as articles, demonstratives, and possessives rank top positions in the corpus of 20 million words

Table 1 COBUILD list of the ten most frequent words in English (Sinclair, 1991)

Master (1997) also pointed out the great occurrence of the English specific determinatives, especially the English articles in complete works representing five written genres in the following table

Table 1.2 Percentage of occurrence of the articles in the five genres (Master, 1997)

Genre Source Zero The A(n) Arts/Dets Total

words Research

Journal

Technical

articles (16) 49.7 38.6 11.8 90.3 63 289 Science

Magazine

Science News

(4 issues) 57.0 28.7 14.3 88.4 34 987 News

Magazine

Newsweek

(1 issue) 46.6 34.4 19.1 82.6 31 896 Novel The Tenth

Additionally, the mastery of English articles contributes to maintain successful communication Pica (1983), who investigated native speakers using articles in exchanges involving the requesting and giving directions, asserted as follows:

…even though participants spoke in grammatically correct utterances, communication broke down when articles were used in reference to items in one participant’s experience but not in another’s (Pica, 1983: 231)

However, the lack of mastery of the English articles can be remarkably found in

An Giang University (AGU) students’ performance of English, both in oral (e.g play, discussion, oral presentation, etc.) and in written production (e.g writing paragraphs, essays, letter writing, etc.) Therefore, the present research attempts to find

role-a solution for improving AGU students’ performrole-ance in using English role-articles

Previous researches have been conducted and addressed the popularity of article errors in second language learners’ compositions Such authors as Tarone (1985), Pica (1983), Parrish (1987), Master (1987), Mizuno (1999), Robertson (2000), and Goto Butler (2002), have dealt with the acquisition of the English articles Other linguists like Whitman (1974), McEldowney (1977), Pica (1983); Master (1990), (1997), Berry (1991), Beaumont and Gallaway (1994) have tried to provide solutions

to improve learners’ performance in using the English articles However, as Master (1990) points out, ‘there are comparatively few attempts in the literature to provide a coherent grammar for teaching the articles as a system’ In the context of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in general and Asia in particular, some attempts have been made to find solutions for Chinese and Japanese learners However, there have been few of research so far on Vietnamese EFL students as well as on AGU English-major students in dealing with the English article system, and that is what this study intends to do

1.2 Statement of Purpose

The present study aims at:

 Identifying what the problems may be for Vietnamese third-year English-major students at AGU in dealing with the English articles

 Finding out major causes of the students’ errors in using English articles

 Providing some recommendations for improving the students’ competence in using English articles

The research questions of the study are:

1 What common errors of the English articles are found in the written production made by the Vietnamese third-year English-major students at AGU?

2 What difficulties do the students meet and deal with when acquiring the

semantic notions of the English articles?

3 Should corpus-based analyses be applied to help the students overcome

the difficulties?

Vietnamese students can make errors in various aspects in their process of learning of English When they write or speak in English, some students may have difficulty in determining genre (content, context), in writing or speaking process itself and in the language system (lexis and grammar) In addition, these are believed to occur at different levels of English proficiency However, the present study simply

focuses on one aspect of errors – English articles made by the third-year English-major students at AGU The other types of errors are excluded from the study

Within current teaching approaches that focus on communication, English articles viewed as ‘short and unimportant’ words have been received relatively little attention In reality, they are the most frequent of all errors that are caught in the English-major students’ essays at AGU So far, only a few studies have been done in the application of teaching and learning English articles in Vietnam in general and in AGU in particular For that reason, carrying out this study, I would like to identify common errors in the use of English articles by Vietnamese third-year English-major students at AGU It is hoped that the study can help both the teachers and students at AGU to raise their awareness of the problems as well as to improve their teaching and learning of English articles

This study employed both qualitative and quantitative methods The qualitative method was used to interpret and analyze documents The quantitative techniques was applied to give a full analysis of the descriptive data related to common errors in the use of the English articles made by the third-year English-major students at An Giang University, the major causes for the errors as well as possible difficulties that the teachers of English and students could face while teaching and learning the English articles

1.6.1 The participants of the study

The participants of the study were 44 third-year students majoring in English at

An Giang University, who are from 20 to 21 years old The students are studying the

Bachelor’s program teaching English After graduation they will teach English at senior high schools or secondary schools in An Giang Province It is assumed that the students have learnt grammatical structures and essay writing However, the reason for sampling the target subject was based on the results of the pilot study: even advanced students still make errors in using the articles

1.6.2 Data collection instruments

The data for the study came from three sources: the students’ essay, a fill in the blank test, and a pretest-posttest group design In this study, essay writing was used instead of a discrete point test because the researcher realizes that choices in English articles have close relationship with noun phrases The assumption is that English article use could not be avoided and English article errors would be relatively frequent The diagnostic test in form of a fill-in-the-blank test was employed to investigate the student subjects’ common errors in the use of English articles Finally, a pretest-posttest group design was carried out to confirm the effectiveness of applying corpus-based analyses with an insight of cognitive grammar in order to help students overcome difficulties in using the English articles

1.6.3 Procedures of the study

First, the researcher delivered the same writing task to 44 third-year major students at AGU In this writing task, students were asked to write an English essay of about 400 words within 60 minutes The essay topics, consisting of two options, were drawn from a TOEFL test preparation book

English-Second, the corpus of 44 essays was analyzed to identify common errors in the use of English articles The errors were calculated relative to the number of words in the essays as well as other major types of errors The errors were categorized globally into syntactic, semantic and mechanical errors The syntactic errors were further sub-

categorized according to the place of occurrence: in the noun phrase, the verb phrase,

or clause structure Lexical errors were semantic errors, and errors in punctuation, capitalization and so on were considered mechanical errors The calculations served the purpose of determining the frequency of occurrence of errors in the use of English articles and the relationship between those errors and other types of errors

Third, a fill-in-the-blank test was administered to the target students (44 students) The rationale was that a more controlled test would make comparisons across subjects possible The test, having 4 parts, was a combination of gap-filling and multiple choice The responses were graded as either right or wrong The goal was to make sure the types of article errors that Vietnamese students make and to investigate the causes of these errors

Four, after presenting the results, the researcher discussed the findings and identified possible causes of Vietnamese students’ errors in the use of English articles

Finally, the study discussed the implications and suggested some recommendations to help the English-major students at AGU improve the effectiveness

of using English articles

The study was based on the following assumptions:

 The sample population of selected students was representative of the majority Vietnamese third-year English-major students at AGU

 The methods and procedures of data collection and analysis were reliable and appropriate to obtain the information to answer the research questions

 The respondents and informants were honest in their responses, and had

no difficulty understanding the items of the research questions

The study consists of five chapters

Chapter 1, Introduction, introduces the background, the purposes, the research questions, the scope and the significance of the study The assumptions as well as the thesis’ organization are also addressed in this chapter

Chapter 2, Literature Review, presents the theoretical background to the study

It includes the following main parts: The meaning of English articles, usages of English articles, the acquisition of the Vietnamese article by L2 learners, and corpora and the application of corpus-based analyses in language teaching and learning

Chapter 3, Methodology, describes the participants involved in the study, the data collection instruments and the research procedure of the study

Chapter 4, Data analysis and Discussion, analyzes and discusses Vietnamese students’ common errors in the use of English articles, answering the research questions

Chapter 5, Summary and Pedagogical Implications, summarizes the findings of the study and then suggests some implications to raise the learners’ awareness in using

English articles at AGU Finally it discusses the limitations of the study

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter consists of four sections relevant to the English articles and the Vietnamese articles in order to build up the English article taxonomy which the researcher will base on to analyze the article errors There are three sections in this chapter In section 2.1, definition of articles and article types will be reviewed The researcher presents classes of nouns as well as previous classifications of nouns proposed by popular researchers, especially suggests the classification of nouns on which the article errors will be compared and analyzed Then definite and indefinite articles in Vietnamese language will be mentioned in section 2.3 to have a comparison between the articles in English and Vietnamese languages Finally, the brief introduction of corpora and the application of corpus-based analyses in language

teaching and learning will be mentioned in section 2.4

2.1.1 Definition of articles

According to Richards and Platt (1992: 21), articles are defined as words which are used with nouns, and which show whether the nouns refer to something definite or something indefinite In other words, definiteness and indefiniteness are considered the main properties distinguishing the articles

The term definiteness is defined in different perspectives of linguists and language educators To these scholars, as usual, definiteness refers to a thing or referent

in the real world which is known, familiar, unique, or identified to the speaker and hearer (Jacobs, 1993:110, Downing and Locke, 1995: 429) Otherwise, an entity is

considered as indefiniteness if it is novel, unfamiliar, or not to be identified by the

hearer (Downing and Locke, 428 - 429)

2.1.2 Types of articles

The notion of the article status of the and a is originally derived from Jespersen

(1949) However, Christophersen (1939), Palmer (1939) and Hawkins (1978) propose

another status which is so-called unstressed some Quirk et al (1985: 265) classifies

some as indefinite in terms of specific reference and sometimes regarded as a plural

article Therefore, it “closely corresponds in function to the indefinite article”

(Chesterman, 1991: 45) As Palmer (1939) puts it, the unstressed some can go before

plural nouns and mass nouns, but not singular count nouns

Yotsukura (1970) suggests one new category, ‘no article’, besides the zero

article which occurs before singular proper nouns and some common nouns Quirk et

al (1985), Chesterman (1991) and others such as Kaluza (1963), Seppanen (1986)

support this viewpoint Furthermore, Chesterman (1991) suggests using the term the

null form for the second zero article originally given by Yotsukura Chesterman (1991)

also notes that the count singular common nouns that can be used with the null form are those that some grammarians classify as having ‘idiomatic’ structures or fixed phrases or in the copular structure Master (1997) agrees with Chesterman and maintains that the null article used before a singular count noun will make it more

familiar than that with the

Since the present study attempts to examine and analyze the article errors made

by the third-year English majors on the basis of cognitive grammar, cognitive linguistic perspectives will be considered, especially fields relating to articles According to

Langacker (1991), together with demonstratives, unstressed some and the ‘zero determiner’ are considered to share the same status as the articles the and a Moreover,

as Langacker puts it, when unstressed some occurs with mass nouns, some expresses a

limited quantity as apposed to an unlimited size, or a maximal quantity of the reference

followed by the zero article In terms of the null article and the zero article, Langacker

believes that whether general mass nouns in plural or mass forms, they are similar to

proper nouns because they are semantically unique and do not need an article (Langacker, 2004) Personally, the researcher thinks that clear distinction between the

null article and the zero article is helpful in identifying the following noun perceived as

a noun designating a type or a nominal designating an instance The distinction will be

in turn useful in categorizing the errors students make

In brief, the researcher will take the view that there are five articles: the, a,

some, zero, and null Because the use of each of these articles depends on the type of

noun it is used with, classes of nouns in English will be presented in the next section, Section 2.2

Different researchers and grammarians have afforded different explanations and criteria on which nouns are classified and sub-classified In this section, I will trace back the representative classifications of nouns to see what criteria and semantic notions of nouns are based on

2.2.1 Classification of nouns proposed by Quirk at al (1985)

Table 2.1 Quirk et al.’s classification of nouns (Quirk et al, 1985: 247)

nouns

proper nouns common nouns

count-nouns non-count nouns

abstract nouns concrete nouns abstract nouns concrete nouns

According to the author, nouns are divided into two categories: common nouns and proper nouns Common nouns are then subdivided into two subgroups: count and non-count noun In each subgroup, a further semantic division is made, which results in

concrete count/non-count and abstract count/non-count However, problems can arise when the following nouns can be viewed as both count and non-count as in the following example from Quirk et al

A: Would you like a cake?

B: No, I don’t like cake

In this example, cake can be considered as a count or noncount noun

To solve these problems, Chesterman (1991) suggested that overlapping cases

or nouns having dual meanings should be based on their typical use to decide the type

of noun However, it is difficult for foreign students to know when a noun is used typical in its typical sense or not?

Similar to traditional grammar, Langacker divides nouns into common nouns, count nouns, non-count nouns and proper nouns Langacker is the first researcher that concentrates on explaining and distinguishing nouns from nominals and other relevant distinctions such as type vs instance, boundedness vs unboundedness, and proper names vs nominals

First, the difference between nouns and nominals is easily recognized by the use of articles A noun has no article, but a nominal does

Ex: A noun: car; camerca

A nominal: this expensive car; the high-quality camera

A noun or a nominal is referred to a thing or a set of interconnected entities which exist in people’s mind The establishing a certain entity helps people locate that entity in space which is so-called ‘the domain of space’ in their mind For example,

when mentioning sand, people know that it refers to a substance Together with the material brought to their mind, the domain of instantiation for sand can also be made,

that is a kind of materials along the beach or the street Thus, the differences can be found in terms of their semantic function Second, an instantiation is used to add more specific information or characteristics to a person or thing, usually quantity elements

Troubles may occur in case proper names are used with the definite article Therefore,

a phrase such as the Henk Joosten is usually considered ungrammatical In fact, in real

life different people have the same name In these cases, some grounding articles are needed

2.2.3 The suggested classification of the article environment

The suggested classification is mostly based on Langacker’s account The aim

is to describe the uses of the articles with as few subcategories as possible Generally, the articles are classified into two big groups: definite and non-definite In the definite group, three subcategories such as names, a type as one instance, and a unique instance

of a type In the non-definite group, there are three subcategories: non-unique instances, arbitrary instances, and maximal instances

In the category of names, there are three sub-categories: proper names, names, and groups Under the category of proper names, there are three components: names of people, temporal names, and place names

pseudo-Under the category of pseudo-names, there are two groups: the Null-group and The-group The term pseudo-names are used to distinguish them from ‘true’ names The null-group consists of nouns relating to institutions, days’ time, season, meals, illnesses, sports, and role

The the-group comprises nouns related to singular nouns that are used with or

without modification, such as geographical names, public institutions and newspapers

The third-group under the category of names is group-names which are treated different from the groups mentioned in that they are plural proper names Article that the goes before an adjective will be considered as nouns

The second category under the heading of definite is type as unique instances

In this category, there are two members: the type hierarchy member group and the global/local role

The third category under the definite heading is a unique instance of a type This category comprises of the three circumstances of discourse space described as

direct awareness, indirect awareness and tenuous awareness, which in turn consists of two sub-groups: nominal content and immediate situation

The second heading of the taxonomy includes three categories: non-unique instances, arbitrary instances, and maximal instances Non-unique instances are actual

or specific instances in relation to the discourse space The three forms of nouns are

singular, mass, and plural nouns These are marked by a and zero or the unstressed

some

In terms of the arbitrary instance group, there are two sun groups of nouns:

singular and plural Under this category, there are three members: generic a, specific a and predicate nominative construction The maximal instance category

non-consists of two groups of nouns: mass and plural nouns They are used with a zero article

In fact, the English article system is not easy to acquire, but given a language teaching position, the author believes that Langacker’s dinstinction between ‘type’ and

‘instance’ helps explaining some uses of articles The researcher will use this taxonomy

to analyze the article errors made by the third-year English-majors at AGU The table

of the suggested classification of the article environments will be attached in the Appendice

LEARNERS

2.3.1 Definite articles

In Vietnamese grammar, definiteness is signaled by các or the absence of a marker, which, since its absence is grammatically significant, is called the ‘zero

article’ ‘Zero’ means that no articles are allowed Các and zero article are not used to

imply the contrast between an entity and the others but to refer to a collection in which the identifiable entity is a member (Diep Quang Ban, 2005: 427- 429)

Ex: Thưa các bạn! Xin mời các bạn yên vị và chúng ta làm việc

(Good morning, everyone Please sit down and perhaps we should begin)

Tôi tìm con mèo (In this situation, con mèo here implies my cat not someone

else’s cat)

In certain circumstances những can be used to substitute for các as in the

following example:

Ex: Xin mời các / những bạn đến trước ngồi vào trong

Semantically, the article các is used to talk about the people who came first only while những implies concurrently two groups: those who came first as well as came later Thus, when các is used, the isolated characteristic of the entity is expressed more obviously than that of những

According to Diep Quang Ban (2005: 429- 430), the absence of both the article and generic classifier of a noun phrase brings to the formation of neutrality, that is, the stated entity of the head noun is either in apparent contrast to others or not

Ex: Mèo khen mèo dài đuôi (Self-praise is no recommendation; Every bird

likes to hear himself sing)

In this illustration, there is a possibility of misunderstanding The interpretation

of the Vietnamese head noun mèo may be generic and indefinite (all cats) or specific

and definite (the cats which are in contrast to the rest)

2.3.2 Indefinite articles

Indefiniteness in Vietnamese grammar is indicated by articles những and một

which stand before singular and plural nouns (Diep Quang Ban, 2005) Indefiniteness

in Vietnamese grammar is indicated by articles những and một which stand before

singular and plural nouns (Diep Quang Ban, 2005: 428) The indefinite noun phrase use places the referred thing of the head noun in the opposed position with related

things that are not directly mentioned In other words, when an indefinite article is used, the stated thing is separated from its larger group and compared with the other members of that group

Ex: “Những cuộc chia lìa khởi tự đây

Những bàn tay vẫy những bàn tay

Những đời phiêu bạt thân đơn chiếc

Lần lượt theo nhau suốt tối ngày”

(Nguyễn Bính) (“The partings begin right here

Hands wag hands

Wandering lives are always solitary

One after the other following all day long”)

“Có lần tôi thấy một người yêu

Tiễn một người yêu một buổi chiều

Ở một ga nào xa vắng lắm

Tay cầm tay họ bóng xiêu xiêu”

(Nguyễn Bính) (“Once I witnessed a lady

She sees off her lover in an evening

At a far-away station

Hands in hands their shadows slanting”)

Apart from indefinite articles những and các, the indefinite one mấy can also

be used; however, its reference is limited in quantity (approximately ten) whereas that

of những and các is unlimited Furthermore, mấy can stand before the classifier cái while các is restricted to this possibility In term of establishing the head noun, mấy is

partly similar to những in putting the thing in the contrary position and partly similar to

các in setting the thing out of the opposed position The article mấy is popular by the

people living in the South and Middle of Vietnam

Ex: Mời mấy anh ghé lại thăm làng quê tôi

(I’d like to invite you to visit my home village)

Mấy cái nhà này cũ quá rồi

(These houses are too obsolete)

The indefinite noun phrase use places the referred thing of the head noun in the opposed position with related things that are not directly mentioned In other words, when an indefinite article is used, the stated thing is separated from its larger group and compared with the other members of that group

ANALYSES IN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING

In recent years the use of corpus to assist teaching and learning English as well

as linguistic researches has become popular in the world However, the concept of corpus may be new to some EFL teachers in Vietnam

2.4.1 What is a corpus?

According to Richards and Platt (1992: 88), a corpus is a collection of materials that has been made for a particular purpose, such as a set of textbooks which are being analyzed and compared or a sample of sentences or utterances which are being analyzed for their linguistic features In other words, a corpus is a collection of texts either in forms of written or spoken, which is stored on a computer Since the development of modern technologies, especially computers and the Internet has strongly influenced people’s life and working styles, people have more conditions to store their large amounts of texts and use analytical software or teaching and learning programs to support their linguistic purposes Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998) add

three important features to the definition of corpus, that is, a corpus is a principled collection of texts that are available for qualitative and quantitative analysis This

definition emphasizes the representative element, the amounts of texts stored on a computer, numbers of occurrences of certain words, and how a word or phrase is used across a corpus Detailed explanations of the above mentioned elements of a corpus will be presented as follows:

2.4.1.1 A corpus is a principled collection of texts

A corpus must be compiled in a systematic way and be a good representation

of a linguistic item Therefore, designing a corpus should be paid great attention so as

to ensure that it is representative For example, if we would like to build a corpus representing common English article errors produced by Vietnamese students, we would have to create a design which captures all the variables of age, gender, location, type of school, level of English, teacher, class size, teaching and learning methods, difficulties of acquiring the English article system and so on Crowdy (1993), Biber (1993), McEnery and Wilson (1996), McCarthy (1998), Meyer (2002), Adolphs (2006) propose essential factors of designing a corpus

2.4.1.2 A corpus is a collection of electronic texts

Most corpora are stored on computers in a variety of forms such as written or spoken texts, or a mix of both Nowadays, together with the innovation of modern technologies multimedia elements such as video clips, MP3, MP4 files can also be used

to facilitate corpora of spoken language To build a corpus of written language, a researcher can enter the texts into a computer by typing, scanning, downloading from the internet or using the existing files or documents in electronic form In general, building a written corpus is less time-consuming to compile than a spoken corpus O’Keffe and Farr (2003) indicate some disadvantages of recording a spoken speech such as different speaker turns, interruptions, speaker overlaps, extra-linguistic

information like ‘giggling’, ‘door closes in background’, ‘dog barking’ Those are the reasons why written corpora are greater than spoken corpora in terms of quantities and varieties

2.4.1.3 A corpus is available for qualitative and quantitative analysis

A corpus can be exploited for different purposes A corpus of written texts can

be used to examine how many times a certain word appears across the text The repetitions of that word will account for the quantitative result, that is, number of occurrences After that the collected number of appearance of the word, or so-called the frequency of a word, can be used to compare with frequencies in other corpora to evaluate how much frequent that word is employed Furthermore, linguists or researchers can focus on the way a word or a phrase is used across the corpus basing on the frequency of the word’s occurrence to get qualitative analysis

2.4.1.4 Which corpus, what for and what size?

It is true that no one corpus that suits everyone’s purpose A good corpus is the one that best suits a person’s needs at a point of time Moreover, the chosen corpus must best represent the language or language variety and it itself can be utilized to compare with other corpora In a pedagogical context, a corpus may be used to serve reference purposes For example, a teacher may ask students to search a corpus to find

out what preposition most commonly follows agree as a verb One big advantage of

looking up a lexico-grammatical query in a corpus is that it provides people with many examples Nevertheless, one weak point of a corpus is that it does not show the meaning of the word or phrase Paper dictionaries or electric dictionaries may also be good tools that help teachers and students deduce the meaning of the search item thanks to the generated examples O’Keeffe, McCarthy and Carter (2007) believe that combining a dictionary and a corpus can be a valuable route in a pedagogical context The following figure shows some corpus examples:

Figure 1: Main entries for agree from the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CD-ROM 2003)

Figure 2: Sample of concordance lines for agree from the PolyU Language Bank Concordancer