USE OF ENGLISH ARTICLES BY SPEAKERS OF TURKISH IN THE EFL SETTING

This study mainly investigates L1-Turkish speakers’ article choice in L2-English. In the study participants’ answers were analyzed on the basis of the following semantic features: definiteness, specificity and partitivity. This study also examines whether the article choice of the participants varies according to their proficiency levels in L2-English. The data collection instrument adopted in this study was a fill-in-the-blanks test which included six types of sentences. The test was administered to 30 low-proficiency and 30 high-proficiency level participants. The results of the fill-in-the-blanks test showed that accuracy rates in six types of sentences were higher than the overuses. In other words, the participants of the study did not associate article the with [+specific] contexts and a with [-specific] contexts. It was also found that the overuse of article the did not reach its maximum level in [+partitive, +specific] contexts. Considering that this study also investigates the article choice of the participants of different proficiency levels, it is clear that the results of the current study are in the line with the previous literature which evidences the role of proficiency in the article choice in L2-English.