the kinds of errors made by thirdyear english language study students in translating articles in terms of generic reference

Analyzing the Problems That Cause Making Errors of Students --- 35 Chapter V Conclusion, Suggestion, and Limitation --- 37 Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu...

CAN THO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

THE KINDS OF ERRORS MADE BY YEAR ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDY STUDENTS IN TRANSLATING ARTICLES IN

THIRD-TERMS OF GENERIC REFERENCE

B.A THESIS

Field of study: English Language Learning

Supervisor: Hong Lu Chi Toan, M Ed Researcher: Tran Anh Thu

Student ID: 7044868Letters of English Class 03 Course 30

Can Tho, May 2008

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

Content - 1

Acknowledgement - 3

Abstract - 4

Interpretation Page - 5

Chapter I Introduction - 6

Chapter II Literature Review - 9

I Definition of the Article - 9

II Types and Usages of the Article - 9

1 Types of the Article - 9

2 Usages of the Article - 10

III Reference and the Article - 13

IV Generic Reference - 14

V Translation - 16

Chapter III Research Methodology - 19

I Research Aim - 19

II Participants - 19

III Instruments - 19

IV Procedure - 20

Chapter IV Data Analysis and Discussion - 22

I Data Collection - 22

II Data Analysis - 22

1 Data Analysis for Items of A/An - 23

2 Data Analysis for items of The - 29

3 Comparison between Data Analysis of “A/An” and “The” - 34

4 Analyzing the Problems That Cause Making Errors of Students - 35

Chapter V Conclusion, Suggestion, and Limitation - 37

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

I Conclusion - 37

II Suggestion - 38

III Suggestion for Further research - 39

IV Limitation - 39

References - 40

Appendices - 42

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu



First of all, I would like to show my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Mr HỒNG LƯ CHÍ TOÀN, who constantly gave me useful advice, tirelessly corrected my draft and actively encouraged

me to work better and better on my research thesis.

Also, I have the greatest respect for and gratitude to Dr NGUYỄN THU HƯƠNG’s real help, positive encouragement to my desirable study and also adequate provision of materials for reference.

I would further like to acknowledge Mr ĐÀO PHONG LÂM and two teachers from the Department of Vietnamese, Mr.CHIÊM VĂN BÉ and Mr NGUYỄN VĂN NỞ, for their substantial help.

My sincere thanks go to all my close friends, my best friends, and my participants – B.A students of English from course 31, for their voluntary involvement in my thesis And special thanks go to

my life friend who gave me mental support at the time I was disheartened on my thesis work.

Last but not least, thank English Department for giving me an opportunity to accept challenge for carrying out a thesis.

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

This thesis deals with the English – Vietnamese translation in terms ofEnglish article related to generic reference The research is conducted to pointout the errors that students commit, to find out the causes that lead to theerrors and to come up with a suggestion of paying attention to article withregard to translation The data were collected from a translation test consisting

of 14 single – sentence items and 2 extra questions responded by 60 juniors ofEnglish at Can Tho University The result shows that the minority of theparticipants(28.57%) yet commit errors on the articles in terms of genericreference Also, the main causes of the errors are that some of the participants

do not have a thorough understanding of reference of article, have a habit oftranslating word - for – word, cannot express Vietnamese equivalences forsome sentences in the test though they know the meanings of each word nthose sentences Importantly enough, some of the participants assume thatsome new words prevent them from doing the translating naturally andaccurately This mistranslation indirectly left a limitation for the data analysisbecause I found it hard to affirm whether the errors committed in theirmistranslation were caused by the new words or by their own incompleteunderstanding on the articles in terms of generic reference To sum up, articles

in terms of generic reference are yet considered simple or sometimes rathereasy, students commit errors when they work with them in English –Vietnamese translation, though

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

INTERPRETATION PAGE

The citations of linguists in Literature review as well as in otherparts of this thesis research without interpretation of page numbers (e.g.McArthur: 1998; Ehrlich: 2000) were cited from websites (see referencepage)

Table 1 Master’s Summary of Aspects of Classification and Identification

(1990).

Table 2 The summary of the use of articles (adapted from Byrd & Benson

:1992).

Table 3 Vietnamese versions of items of “A/An”.

Table 4 Figures in the scales of Vietnamese versions of “A/An” Table 5 The percentages in the scales of Vietnamese versions of “A/An” Table 6 Vietnamese versions of items of “The”.

Table 7 Figures in the scales of Vietnamese versions of “The”.

Table 8 The percentages in the scales of Vietnamese versions “The”.

Table 9 The comparison Vietnamese versions between “A/An” and

“The”.

Chart 1 Vietnamese versions of “A/An”.

Chart 2 Vietnamese versions of “The”.

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Vietnam’s joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) has promoted asignificance of English in the country where English is employed to makeitself globally understood Consequently, learning English in Vietnam hasbeen a nation – wide race Vietnamese have been involved in learning it asproficiently and professionally as possible

The integration into WTO requires English not only in listening, speaking,reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary, but also in translation (writtentranslation) which is mostly manipulated in documents, agreements,negotiations, law, and many other necessary paper work

As far as translation is concerned, most students may think that if they aregood at English, especially in grammar and vocabulary, they are able to do thetranslating accurately However, translation asks for much more than that.Students have to be proficient in both English and their mother tongue –Vietnamese so that the version into English or Vietnamese could be accurate

in the target language and faithful to its original one

In translation, the article system causes quite a few problems to deal with.Actually, I myself have faced difficulties in translating “article” which isreally thought easy and simple by most students As Celce-Mucrcia andLarsen-Freeman (1983), and Huong (2005) have pointed out that articleproblems, unlike other grammar or syntactic problems, do not disappear asstudents become more proficient They also state that the article system inEnglish is notoriously difficult to acquire, probably because Vietnamese has aclassifying system in which, among other things, distinctions are madebetween human, animal, concrete and abstract, whereas English distinguishesbetween count and non- count noun, which is related to boundedness Also,another obvious evidence about the problems Vietnamese learners gettingTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

with the English article system is that the absence of article system inVietnamese (Butler 2002; Berry 1991; Master 1988; Thomas 1989; Yamada

& Matsuura 1982) Therefore, it is very difficult for Vietnamese learners tofind the equivalence between English and Vietnamese when translating sometext relating to the English article

In addition, even though article is hard to acquire, students’ attitude toward

it is not positive They invest less time in it In fact, they just search for andread what is needed for the exams They do not explore it in depth As aresult, they get confused when they work with article in translation Forexample, “A woman always remembers her first love with affection” (ThuUyen, 2007, P.176) cannot be completely natural in Vietnamese like “Một người đàn bà luôn thương nhớ về người tình đầu tiên của cô ấy” although the version is understandable and acceptable in Vietnamese When a translationversion differs somewhat from the original one, it is easy to give rise toreaders having a different look at what the writer wants to convey The above– mentioned translation version might lead to a look that the writer refers to aspecific woman whereas the writer really does not Rather, the writer makesthe reference of “woman” in general Then, that sentence should be bettertranslated as follows “người đàn bà luôn nhớ thương người tình đầu tiên”(Thuuyen, 2007,248) In other words, the article “A” is not translated inVietnamese version

What has been mentioned from the beginning of the introduction inspires

me to carry out an investigation into what majoring – English juniors at CanTho University work with English article system in translation.Therefore, myresearch will try to answer two questions:

(1) Do third –year English language study students commit errors intranslating the English articles in terms of generic reference?

(2) What causes the errors?

The research is outlined as followings:

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

Chapter I: IntroductionChapter II: Literature reviewChapter III: Research methodologyChapter IV: Data analysis and discussionChapter V: Conclusion, suggestion and limitation

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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW

Article is a word which is used with a noun, and which shows whether thenoun refers to something definite or something indefinite (Richards, J.Plattand H Platt: 1985:22) Also, article is a word whose role is to mark noun

phrase as either “definite” or “indefinite” For example, definite the in the girl, indefinite a in a girl (Mathew: 1997:25) Thus, articles are described as

“markers” that accompany a noun or a noun phrase and that denote qualities

of “definiteness” or “indefiniteness”

Owing to the fact that articles accompany a noun or a noun phrase, they

are considered as noun modifiers or noun markers (Ehrlich: 2000) However,

they are not adjectives because they do not describe the noun Rather, theyindicate the type of reference being made by the noun or the noun phrase.Articles work as noun modifiers or noun markers, but not as noun describers

As a result, they are named determiners that are involved “a/an” and “the” and

classified as types of articles

1 Types of Articles:

According to McArthur(1998) and Ehrlich(2000), there are only two types

of article in English: the, the definite article, and a/an, the indefinite article In

contrast, Quirk (1973), Murphy (1985), Eastwood (1999) and Hewings(1999)Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

state that article system involves three types: definite article (the), indefinite article (a/an) and zero article In fact, zero article is really the omission of the

definite article which is omitted when the writer does not specify a particularamount or quantity of the noun (Ehrlich: 2000) For example, “Salt is animportant commodity” In other words, zero article has the same sort ofindefinite meaning as a/an before singular nouns This convention and theusage it describes are distinct from the suppression of articles in certain kinds

of writing and speaking, such as note-taking (have suitcase, will travel: I have

a suitcase and I am willing to travel) and elliptical instructions (as in dramaticscripts: leaves room: the actor leaves the room) (McArthur: 1998) However,zero article, more or less, makes sentences change their meaning (Swan:2004:55)

2. Usages of Articles:

Article use is dependent on the representation sought by the speaker, not

on rule (Hewson: 1972:94) Actually, article use may have more to do withcommunication and communicative competence than with grammar andlinguistic competence (Pica: 1983:222) To a great extent, we depend ondiscourse context to determine what is definite and what is indefinite (CelceMuricia and Larsen Freeman: 1983) The indefinite article(a/an) is used when

we have a singular countable noun that is unknown or not specific to thehearer, while the definite article( the) is used or the reader knows whatspecific noun we are talking about( Swan:2004:56)

Largely, Mizuno (1993a) describes the process of choosing an article asbinary, in that there are levels of test criteria that can only be answered with a

"yes" or "no" According to Mizuno, there are four criterion levels: (1)Discourse Labeling (Is the object new to the discourse?), (2) NumericLabeling (Is the object countable?), (3) Class Labeling (Is the object plural orsingular?), (4) Phonetic Labeling (Does the noun which follows begin with aTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

vowel?) However, Master (1990) proposes a binary system Master’srationale for article choice is based not on "yes" or "no" decisions, but on the

concepts of "identification" (marked by the) or "classification"(marked by a or

Ø) (table 1) He states that determining the correct article requires aconsideration of definiteness (+ definite), specificity (+specificity),countability (+ count) and number (+ singular).He suggests collapsing thesecategories into a system in which + definite and + specificity would become

"identified", taking the definite article The cases of definite and specificwould be considered "classified" (Master: 1990:465) Therefore, in many

cases, choosing a or the is only a matter of viewpoint and style

(Chistophersen: 1993) As a result, Byrd & Benson (1992) give the summary

of the use of articles (table 2)

Table1 Master’s Summary of Aspects of Classification and Identification (1990)

Classification(a;Ø) Identification (the)

Count/noncount

Ranking adjectivesShared knowledgeDefining postmodification Limiting postmodification

Partitive of-phrase Descriptive of-phrase

Intentional vagueness

General characteristics

Existential there and it

Generic the

Classified proper nouns Proper nouns (Øandthe)

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Table2 the summary of the use of articles (adapted from Byrd & Benson :1992)

A(n) 1 with indefinite singular or plural count nouns (“Indefinite”

means that the speaker thinks that the listener does not know

what is being talked about.):e.g I met a musician at the concert.

1.with definite singular or plural count nouns(“Definite means

that the speaker thinks that the listener knows what is being

talked about.):e.g I bought the required textbook(s) for this

class yesterday.

2 with definite noncount nouns: e.g., I found the information

for my research project.

3 with generic singular count nouns: e.g Modern life has been

changed by the computer.

The

4 With some proper nouns that are plural or collective

semantically: e.g the United States; the Soviet Union.

1 with most proper nouns: e.g., John lives in Alaska.

2 with generic plural nouns: e.g., Tigers are both beautiful and

dangerous.

Zeroarticle (Ø)

3 with generic noncount nouns: e.g., people need water to live.

1 Singular-count nouns must have an article or another central

determiner (see Note)

Twoimportant

factsaboutarticles

2 For generic meaning, noncount nouns never have an article or

another central determiner

Note Determiners are used to specify the reference of a noun, “and there

are three subgroups among them: pre-, central-, and post- determiners (BiberTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

et al.:1999: 258) Central determiners include articles, demonstratives (e.g.

this, that), possessives (e.g my, her, their), universal (each, every), dual (either, neither), WH (what, which, whose) determiners, assertive/non-

assertive (some, any), and negative (no) (Master: 2002: 339-340).

Generally, both articles and determiners play an important role inspecifying the reference of a noun

According to Richards, J Platt and H Platt (1985), reference is therelationship between words and the things, actions, events and qualities theystand for Reference in its wider sense would be the relationship between aword or phrase and an entry in the external word (the word TREE refers to theobject TREE) Reference in its narrower sense is the relationship between a

word or phrase and a specific object (Peter’s horse refers to a horse which is

owned by Peter).Moreover, Master(1990) argues that “whether or not we

mean a specific , actual tick [as in A tick entered my ear] or a generic one [as

in A tick carries disease],we still classify that tick when we use the article

“a”(Master:1990:467) However, in case of “I need a digital camera, but I couldn’t find it versus I couldn’t find one, the distinction between specific and

generic reference is very important Thus, readers can guess which word orphrase is specific or generic basing on context because context, in turn, has animportant influence on article choice (Zalewski: 1993:696)

For those reasons, Quirk & Greenbaum (1973) classify reference of theEnglish article system into Unique reference, Specific reference and Genericreference Unique reference also divides many small pieces involving propernouns, Personal nouns, Calendar items, Geographical names, Name+commonnouns, and Proper nouns with definite article(Quirk:1973:76-79).Specific

reference is mentioned by indefinite a/an and definite the, and Generic

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reference is concentrated much on nationality words and adjectives as head

(Quirk & Greenbaum:1973:68-73).Moreover, it is essential to make adistinction between specific and generic reference (Quirk:1973:67)

Generic reference is a type of reference, which is used to refer to a class ofobjects or things rather than to a specific member of a class (Richards, J.Plattand H Platt: 1985:155).Actually, in terms of semantic, we are seldominterested in one kind of sentence referring to a class of objects or things thatare used very much in our daily communication in both conversations andacademic texts This kind of sentence is called generic sentence, which is used

as the aim of generic reference of speakers or writers (Thu Uyen: 2007) Forexample,

“An honest woman always has friends, and is never separated from herfamily” [17, p 538]

“ Đàn bà đứng đắn, ai là chẳng có bè bạn, và có bao giờ lại cắt đứt hoàntoàn quan hệ với gia đình” [16, p.514]

Grammatically, Thu Uyen emphasizes that generic sentence is an idealstructure for the combination of words, but the entities or the subjects

ink

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mentioned in this kind of sentence always manifest their inherent attributes.For instance,

“…a man, who labours under the pressure of pecuniary embarrassments,

is, with the generality of people, at a disadvantage”

“….một con người loay hoay trong cảnh túng bấn về tiền tài thì phải ở địa

vị bất lợi hơn so với phần lớn những người khác”.( Thu Uyen:2007:536)

In a simple term, generic sentences are used when one refers to a wholegroup or class, to generalize about all possible member of a group withoutdistinguishing with any specific individual or any individual in that group orclass.(Hurford: 2001:56; Fillip and Carlson: 1997:176) such as

“The whale is a mammal”

Cá voi là loài động vật có vú” or

“Dogs are animals”

“Chó là động vật” (Nguyễn Minh: 2005:56)More specifically, Thewlis (2000 states “Both the and a (n) can be used toexpress generic statements” like

“A lion is a mighty creature” or

“The computer is changing the business world” (Master: 1996)

Similarly, Berry (1993) emphasizes that use of generic The to indicate

Membership like

“The third task of the teacher is criticism” or

“The kitchen can be a very suitable place to take a nap”, and

In a narrower sense, the definite plural can also be used generically with

nouns of nationality and names of animals and plants representing groups larger than species (Lyons: 1999:181) as in

“The Swiss consume a lot of chocolate” or

“The cats- at least the big ones like tigers and pumas – are particularlyfierce predators”

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However, the problematic nature of using article in terms of generic

reference is that one form of article a/an or the represents multiple functions

(McEldowney: 1977).This is illustrated as the following examples:

(1) The American is a good debater

(2) An American is a good debater

(3) The Americans are good debaters

(4) Americans are good debaters

Depending on the context, the subject in each of the above can fulfill thesame generic function (McEldowney: 1977).Convincingly, Weeble (2007)exemplifies exactly the same as McEldowney’s analysis For instance,

(1) The teacher is low-paid everywhere

(2) A teacher is low-paid everywhere

(3) Teachers are low-paid everywhere

(4) The teachers are low-paid everywhere

These four examples are totally the same information that thespeaker/writer wants to convey that “ở đâu thì giáo viên( giáo viên in general)

cũng bị trả lương thấp” The only difference between these four sentences is style The style from (1) to (4) is from most formal to less formal in uses.Therefore, sometimes when writing or speaking you are not referring to onemember of a class or to specific entity; instead you want to refer to the wholeclass or every member of the whole class (Weeble: 2007) Therefore, it isvery necessary to have the ways to realize generic sentences and the ways totranslate them into Vietnamese exactly (Thu Uyen: 2007)

Translation, in a simple term, is a process of finding a target languageequivalent for a source language utterance (Pinhuck: 1977) In contrast,Catford(1965) assumes that translation is the replacement of textual materialTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

in one language by equivalent textual material in another language or is thereplacement of written message in one language by the same message inanother language ( Newmark: 1981) On the other hand, Translation involvesthe rendering of a source language text into the target language so as to ensurethat the surface meaning of the two will be approximately similar to thestructure of the source language and will be preserved as closely as possible,but not so closely that the target language structure will be seriously distorted(McGuire:1980) More deeply, Will in Noss (1982) defines translation as atransfer process which aims at the transformation of a written source languagetext into an optimally equivalent target text, and which requires the syntactic,the semantic, and the pragmatic understanding and analytical processing of

the source language For example, A/An has different meanings in

Vietnamese, A/An is translated as “ MỘT” in case of

“I was beginning to mix with people of a kind I’d never mixed before”

“Tôi bắt đầu hòa mình với những người là một loại người(Môt loại trong

nhiề u loại # The kind : loại người đó)tôi chưa từng trà trộn trước đây.”(Lê

Văn Sự: 2003:18)

A/An is translated as “NÀO ĐÓ” in case of

“On this particular morning, he sat facing a new client, a Mr.redginal

Wade”

“Vào buổi sang đặc biệt ấy, ông ta ngồi đối diện một khách hàng mới, ông

Redginal Wade nào đ ó”( Lê Văn Sự:2003:19), and

A/An are not translated in case of

“Unless I can get to a major competition and win it, I haven’t a chance ofestablishing myself here”

“Trừ khi tôi có thể dự một cuộc tranh tài lớn và thắng cuộc , tôi sẽ không

có cơhội làm ăn ở đây” (Lê Văn Sự:2003:20)

A/An in three cases of those examples above clearly illustrates Master’saccount about “classification” as in table1 since three cases lies in theTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

classification of Master Therefore, Translation is really good when thetranslation in target language is natural and right to the aim that sourcelanguage conveys (Duff: 1989).

Mistranslation can result from incomplete understanding of grammar;inability to pick out an appropriate meaning from a list of meaning of a word

in the dictionary; and failure in finding an equivalence in the target language

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CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This descriptive research aim to find out the errors students made duringthe process of translation related to the English article system in terms ofgeneric reference This study, moreover, also aims to identify the mainproblems or difficulties that they get while translating sentences related togenericity

II Participants:

The participants in my research are 60 third-year English Language Studystudents from Course 31 They have been chosen randomly to take part in thisstudy They have been found in the random alternative of participants sincethey have completed the modules of translation, theory of translation one andgrammar In other words, they have acquired basic as well as advancedknowledge of articles Actually, before tackling “generic reference terms”,students need to have understood the article in nongeneric contexts at theirintermediate level (Peter Master)

III Instruments:

Two main instruments that are used in this study included a translation testand a questionnaire The translation test (see appendices page) is drawn upwith 14 single items that requires students to translate them from English intoTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

Vietnamese These 14 sentences all contain the English article in terms ofgeneric reference Concretely, seven sentences contain the article “The” andthe others contain “A/An” They are disposed in a random order Twoquestions are attached to the test in order to ask students to present theirproblems or difficulties while they were translating The answers to the twoquestions are an effective instrument to find out the items they are faced with,and these are also an important part to put forward the suggestion in thisstudy.

Fourteen sentences in isolation were not made up on my own, butcollected from many different textbooks, scientific studies and journals, andinternet sources (see reference page) Particularly, they are selected in the part

of generic reference that is mentioned in each book or research I consult towrite literature review

I have chosen these sentences to make up the translation test because theyhave noticeable features for the purpose of my study, and they are also reliablesources illustrated in literature review

Also, an important and decisive instrument of this study is interviewingteachers whose major and interest are Vietnamese Language Study Theirexcellent and positive suggestions are one of the criteria for the data analysis

in this research

IV. Procedure:

The test was passed out to students, and they did the test in the atmosphere

of doing a translation exercise That is to say, they did the test with the help ofdictionaries

The answers or responses are used as a precious material to find out theanswer to the research questions, and information that are not related toTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

research questions and supported by the answers of those students will beconsidered suggestions in this research.

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CHAPTER IV DATA ANALYSIS AND DICUSSION

I Data collection:

An English – Vietnamese translation test was passed out to sixty students However, 59 papers could be used as data for analysis because one paper wasnot completed In this paper, only three out of 14 sentences were done, so itwas eliminated with a view of incomplete responses

As for the two supporting questions attached to the test, they were replied

by all the sixty students

II Data Analysis:

The test consists of 14 sentences in which seven deals with “a/an” andseven deals with “the” Therefore, there will be two main parts and two minorparts of analysis The first part of analysis deals with sentences with “a/an”.The second one deals with sentences with “the”, and two others are thecomparison between two parts above and summary of the causes of makingerrors of students

The correctness and accuracy of the students’ versions of the Vietnamese

sentences are ranked as follow: excellent, acceptable, incorrect and others.

The meanings of the ranks are somehow explained basing on the definitions oftranslation in the literature review

“Excellent” – the versions of the target language (Vietnamese) or the

translation into Vietnamese is close to the source language ( English) inmeaning that is transferred in a natural and smooth way If possible, theTrung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu

versions of the target language may be close to or even better than thesuggested answer which is used as a tool of reference.

“Acceptable” – the translating is not done in a natural and smooth way,

but it is not misunderstood or understood in another way

“Incorrect” – the meaning in the target language translation is completely

wrong to the source language that leads the readers to misunderstanding or notunderstanding anything at all

“Others” – the sentences are left unfinished or are not translated.

“Suggested Answer” (see appendices page) – this version was corrected

by two teachers The former is a teacher of translation and the latter is ateacher whose PhD dissertation is on “article” In addition, the version of thetarget language (Vietnamese) was also agreed by two teachers who areinterested in Vietnamese Language Study

1. Data analysis for items of A/An:

Here are the commonest versions transferred by students:

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