The Role of L1 and Age Effect in the Acquisition of EnglishArticles among Croatian Young EFL Learners

The category of definiteness/indefiniteness is often seen as a linguistic universal (Chomsky 2000; Silić 2000) that exists in every human language but is expressed with different linguistic means and patterns in different languages. In English, this category is grammaticalized primarily via articles (Zergollern-Miletić 2008). The Croatian language does not contain an article system, and acquiring English articles represents a major problem for most learners of English as a foreign language (Balenović and Medved Krajnović 2013; Zergollern-Miletić 2015). The present paper investigates difficulties in acquiring English articles among young learners in Croatia in written tasks. Pupils involved in the research started learning English in the first grade of primary school. A total of 76 primary school learners from six different classes (schools) and different age groups were included in this research. The initial hypothesis is that the correct use of articles increases as learners’ overall L2 proficiency increases due to exposure to instructed EFL learning. A qualitative analysis was carried out using error analysis, i.e., proper/wrong use, or omission of the article. The findings partially confirmed the initial hypothesis and showed that our participants were becoming aware of the existence of English articles (they comprehended that articles should precede nouns), but we found very frequent article omission, which, according to our research results, indicates that the process of developing and understanding the semantic and pragmatic role of English articles is long and fluctuating specifically with learners whose L1 lacks the article system.