INTRODUCTION

When English is taught as a second language in an English-speaking country, that means, mostly to learners who are immigrants, teachers tend to be less aware of specific L1-induced areas of difficulty for their learners, due to the heterogeneity of the learners’ L1 background. However, English is also taught in what is sometimes referred to as a “foreign language” context, in non-English speaking countries, which are sometimes very linguistically homogeneous, as is the case with Poland. In such contexts, teachers tend to be well aware of the typical problem areas to expect from their students, and it is common knowledge which target language features tend to cause difficulty. The English articles are a classic example of a well-known problem area, and it is also possible that some of the teachers themselves, being speakers of L1 Polish, might be less confident than usual when it comes to correcting their students’ article errors.

Since the statement that “articles are difficult” is such a common remark in the English teaching context in Poland, this chapter provides an overview of theoretical perspectives on the concept of difficulty, to see if those theoretical perspectives allow for a better elucidation of the reasons which underlie the challenges posed by this specific feature of the English language.

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO DIFFICULTY

A number of criteria have been put forward in the literature, in a rather chaotic and scattered matter, to account for what it means for a structure to be difficult, including formal or structural complexity, form-meaning relationships, developmental stages, learnability, typological markedness, and teachers’ perceptions of learner difficulty (see Ekiert & Han, 2017). Difficulty has been described as a very challenging concept to define (see DeKeyser, 2005 for an in-depth discussion). According to Housen and Simoens, the existing literature on the topic is scarce, difficulty is usually investigated in connection with a different concept which is the main focus of research, and