This study investigates the role of age of first exposure in the acquisition and processing of English articles in an EFL setting. Fifty advanced Korean learners of English participated in a grammatical acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. The participants were divided into two groups depending on the initial age at which they were constantly exposed to English at least 3 hours per week (‘early group’ < 12; ‘late group’ ≥ 12). No significant performance differences were observed between the two groups in the judgment task. However, meaningful differences were found between the reading behaviors of the two groups in the self-paced reading task. These findings show that the learners’ age of first exposure has a significant impact on learners’ performance when the ability to process English articles in real-time is evaluated. In contrast, it has much less impact on learners’ performance on a task which tests explicit knowledge under no time-limit condition.

This study investigated the effects of two types of corrective feedback (CF), recasts and metalinguistic feedback (implicit vs. explicit CF), on the development of implicit and explicit knowledge of English articles. It also examined the relationship between learners’ language aptitude, in particular language analytic ability, and their knowledge development through different types of CF. Six intact intermediate communication English classes (a total of 104 students and two English-speaking teachers) at a university participated in the present study. In CF groups, learners received recasts or metalinguistic feedback (MF) to the errors of the English articles during communicative activities, while no CF was given to the control group. The study employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design, and four different tests were used to measure learner implicit and explicit knowledge. The study found both recasts and MF effective in the development of implicit knowledge and selective effects of recasts on the improvement of explicit knowledge. This suggests that both implicit and explicit CF bring about the development of implicit and explicit knowledge. In addition, language analytic ability was found to be closely related to learners’ gains through both CF and development of explicit and implicit knowledge of English articles.

The study investigates the relative effects of two types of indirect written corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English articles. Thirty-five high intermediate Korean EFL college students who were enrolled in three composition classes participated in this study. After the instruction on the English article usage, three classes (Class A, Class B, and Class C) received different types of feedback on their blog writings over the course of a semester. Both Class A and Class B received indirect feedback in the form of underlining errors. In the following class, Class A received correct forms with metalinguistic information for the errors revised incorrectly, but Class B did not have such opportunities. The Class C received no feedback. The results showed that only Class A, which received indirect feedback plus correct forms with metalinguistic information, made a statistically significant gain from the 3 sessions of feedback treatment. Pedagogical implications were provided on the basis of the findings.

This study investigates variation in article use by Korean secondary school students of English. The study shows how two different tasks affect variation with respect to article types (a, the, and zero), proficiency level and the semantic feature, specificity. One task, a wide domain task, focused on grammar in general and the narrow domain task focused on articles. The statistical results showed that the subjects performed significantly better on the narrow domain task than on the wide domain task. The subjects showed significant differences among the three articles in the wide domain task, while they did not in the narrow domain task. The subjects performed significantly better with non-specific DPs (Determiner Phrases) than with specific DPs in the wide domain task, but reversed results were revealed in the narrow domain task. The present study presents some finding that grammatical domain plays a role as a variable for variability and shows that different tasks on the same research topic may produce different findings.