The research presented in this book attempts to find a solution for
improving Vietnamese learners’ performance in using English articles.
English articles are ‘little words’ and within current teaching approaches
that rely heavily on communication, they receive relatively little attention.
However, English articles occur very frequently and incorrect use may
affect communication negatively. Also an L2 writer may prefer to be
accurate, especially if s/he is to write professionally.
The English articles, the, a, and zero, are the most commonly used
words in English. In the COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University
International Language Database) list of the ten most frequent words in
English (Sinclair, 1991), theranks first in the corpus of 20 million words
and a the fifth (Table 1).
Table 1. COBUILD list of the ten mo
