Wednesday, November 16, 2005
2005-2006/029

Guest lecturer at U. of I. Dec. 2 to discuss errors in
English article usage by second language learners

Dr. Tania Ionin of the Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California, will give a lecture entitled, “Acquisition of English articles by second language learners,” on Friday, Dec. 2, at 4 p.m., in Room G-23 of the Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana.

The talk, co-sponsored by the U. of I. Division of English as an International Language and the Department of Linguistics, is free and open to the public.

Professor Ionin’s talk will examine article choice in second language (L2) acquisition, with a focus on article misuse: overuse of “the” in place of “a” and overuse of “a” in place of “the.”

Ionin will argue that errors of article misuse in L2-English are not random, but follow from an association of English articles with universal semantic distinctions: the learners' problem lies in deciding which of these distinctions is appropriate for English. The lecturer will also address the role of first language (L1) transfer in the acquisition of English articles and possible pedagogical applications of her findings.