Reassembling Formal Features in Articles by L1 Persian Learners of L2 English

There  has  been  considerable  debate  over  what  the  sources  of  morphological  variation  in  second  language acquisition  are.  From  among  various  hypotheses  put  forth  on  the  topic,  the  feature  reassembly  hypothesis (Lardiere, 2005) assumes that it is the reconfiguration of features in the L2 which causes variation between the performance of natives and non-natives. Acknowledged as one of the most difficult elements of English grammar  to  be  acquired  by  learners,  the  article  system  was  the  focus  of  the  present  study  which  aimed  at attending to the acquisition of that system by Persian learners. This descriptive piece of research focused on how the article system functions in English and Persian, the similarities found across the two languages and the  possible  sources  of  difficulty  for  Persian  learners  in  using  English  articles  as  related  to  their  L1.  The participants included Persian  learners at three levels of  grammatical  knowledge.  A group of English native speakers also took part in the study. A grammaticality judgment test and a translation test were conducted to collect  data.  Comparisons  were  made  among  the  four  groups,  using  ANOVAs.  Based  on  the  results,  it  is argued that the observed pattern of article use among Persian speaking learners can be best accounted for by the feature reassembly hypothesis.