The difficulty of learning and using English articles (a/an, the) came up in a Twitter conversation yesterday, so considering I did a PhD on this I’ll do a thread explaining why articles might be so difficult.

(Disclaimer: This is based on my research and opinions).

In English articles are used a) to signal that a noun is coming in the sentence and b) to indicate whether the noun (i.e. referent) is identifiable within discourse. Trenkic (2009) uses the pic below to illustrate this.

If a friend & I are looking at these mugs I might say “Pass me the red mug” because the noun/referent is uniquely identifiable to both of us (we can see the mugs). But I would say “Pass me a blue mug” because there is more than one blue mug which are not uniquely indentifiable.

But not all languages use articles like English. In fact, most Asian and Slavic languages don’t have articles (that’s a lot of languages). Instead they use context and other word forms to express this difference between referents.

In other words, such languages allow nouns to be bare (no article) while English does not (at least not for countable singular nouns). E.g., “Pass me mug please” or “Pass me red mug”.

So when learners of English as a second language (L2) are learning to use articles they not only need to acquire the semantic meaning of articles (to mark definiteness) but also need to learn that certain noun phrases have to be preceded by an article even when the article seems

communicatively unnecessary. This appears to be very difficult. Many speakers of English who are highly proficient struggle with articles. One of the reasons is that if your native language (L1) doesn’t have articles it will be more difficult for you to use them in your L2.

Some theories suggest that certain aspects of grammar that don’t exist in the L1 can never be successfully acquired in the L2. Articles appear to be one such challenge.

We don’t fully understand why that is so. One possibility is that when we learn an L2 we draw on L1 structure. If the structure is not there (it doesn't exist in L1) then there is nothing to draw on (put simply).

However, age seems to be a factor here as well. People that are early bilinguals or have acquired the L2 at an earlier age, especially through immersion, seem to have an easier time acquiring English articles.

We definitely need more research on this, especially neurolinguistic studies. Behavioural studies (including mine) can only tell us so much.