THE USE OF ARTICLES IN FRENCH: AN OBSERVATION

Abstract

Studying French as a foreign language is enjoyable among Malaysian students. Even though French is not widely used in comparison to English as the second language in Malaysia, there are many courses offered in French to meet university programme requirements. Each language has its own challenges, especially in relation to the application of its grammar rules, and learning French is no exception, too. Therefore, this current study focuses on the exceptional use of articles in various sentence structures in French. To achieve this, students’ formative-assessment projects, which are role plays based on specific situations captured in short videos, have been meticulously scrutinised and analysed. To support the collected data, interviews with two French lecturers have been conducted to elicit some professional feedback pertaining to the use of articles in French by the students. The findings show that errors associated with using articles for masculine and feminine nouns and the use of definite and indefinite articles are abundant in the students’ pre-recorded conversations. This is due to the fact that the articles used are not equivalent or do not even exist in their mother tongue. Hence, this study suggests that the students need to increase their knowledge of the French language and keep drilling intensively and continuously on the use of French articles for innumerable nouns and nouns phrases in French discourses.