Negative Transfer of Chinese on the Acquisition of English Articles

English articles can be divided into three categories: indefinite article, definite article as well as zero article, which find themselves appearing in both oral and written English at a relatively high frequency as functional words. For Chinese English learners of the beginning stage, English articles are usually taught in the first several lessons. Although English articles are seeming ly easy in terms of their semantic meanings, few Chinese learners can really arrive at the level where they can use them proficient ly and grasp their usage in their entirety. Some researchers hold that the negative transfer of Chinese can account for that problem because the Chinese language doesn't have an article system which is equivalent to that of English, while others strongly criticize this viewpoint. The paper is aimed at verifying the mother tongue interference on the acquisition of English articles by advanced Chinese English learners, especially at how the differences in generic expressions between Chinese and English give rise to those problems concerning the acquisition of English articles. Owing to the limitation of the length and depth of this paper, a hypothe sis that Chinese English learners generally consider the English indefinite article"a/an"as being equal to"一个"in their mother tongue is put forward as a premise. To prove this hypothesis, two mini tests were carried out among 47 senior English majors in two classes respectively in BLCU and the results of the tests conform to the hypothesis positively. It can be safely asserted that due to the negative transfer of Chinese on the acquisition of English articles, even advanced Chinese English learners display their cog nitive inadequacies of English generic references performed by English articles and inappropriate omission of English indefinite ar ticles.