Pointing Out, Naming, and Liking Things in English

Abstract

This paper takes a functional rather than a structural perspective to the acquisition of articles in English by Korean children. We first examine three different communicative functions of the English article and plural in elementary English language teaching: indicating (“Look at the apple”, “Give me the apple”), naming (“This is an apple”), and signifying (“I like apples”). We suggest that, contrary to first language acquisition, in elementary foreign language learning, the child sometimes adapts, or, more correctly, exapts more abstract and general structures for new functions rather than less developed ones. We illustrate these problems with some data gathered from an “open dialogue” exercise where the learners improvise dialogues in teams, gathered over three years. Some modest suggestions, as well as a highly ambitious one, ensue: the modest suggestion is to teach the indefinite article as a variant of the number “one” to teach the definite article as a demonstrative. The highly ambitious one is that we stop treating elementary English education as a niche market for global EFL and treat it, conversely, as a form of elementary education with important implications for overall child development.