INTRODUCTION

Articles are usually considered unteachable. In the words of Gass and Selinker: “the English article system… appears to be virtually impermeable to instruction” (2008, p. 383). Testimonies to that effect can easily be found in the literature, such as a teacher's comment to the effect that the way his students use articles “bears little or no resemblance to established English practice; the students seem to use articles almost randomly” (Yamada & Matsuura, 1982, p. 50).

There are good theoretical grounds for articles to be difficult for learners, as was shown in Chapter 4, and much has been written about the various difficulties that learners face with articles. However, despite the acquisition of articles by ESL learners being quite a well-researched area (as could be seen in Chapter 5), relatively little has been said in terms of specific teaching recommendations. One problem is the low level of success with direct instruction, which is most likely due to the huge complexity of metalinguistic rules and the poor usability of such rules in language production. Articles are commonly believed to be best learnt from context, and therefore large amounts of exposure to English should facilitate acquisition. This does not mean, however, that learners exposed to a lot of input do not have problems with articles. In Ekiert's study (2004), learners from an EFL context were compared with those in an ESL context. While the sequence of the acquisition of articles was similar, the EFL learners were more accurate in their article choices. This appears to contradict the belief that exposure to natural language is the best way to learn the “unteachable” articles. However, due to small group size and differences in learner profiles, those conclusions are only tentative.

ARTICLES AND THE EFFICACY OF CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK

The bulk of research on the teaching of articles comes from studies on the efficacy of corrective feedback, as articles are often selected as the target language feature in such studies. Corrective feedback is defined as the information provided to L2 learners about the ill-formedness of their production (Stefanou & Révész, 2015). In the studies which involve articles, the corrective feedback tends to be written.