Speakers of other languages often have trouble learning the article system in English. This study traces the development of six learners, three Arabic speakers whose first language (L1) has articles and three Chinese speakers whose L1 does not. The study follows how learners use articles and maps that usage onto Huebner's (1983) semantic wheel to see their interlanguage form-function relationships with articles. Short spontaneous speeches by two groups of learners over the course of a year were used to see if the learners' L1 affects their development (Master, 1997; Zobl, 1982). Articles are examined in the context of the noun phrase in which they appear (Liu & Gleason, 2002; Huebner, 1983; Parrish, 1987; Robertson, 2000) and the countability of the noun phrase is also considered (Hiki, 1990). It was found that the Arabic speakers were more accurate in their use of the and ¨, but the Chinese were more accurate with a(n). Overall, there are few differences between the target-like use of the two groups and this is hypothesized to be due to neither Arabic nor Chinese having an indefinite article (Kharma, 1981; Thompson-Panos & Thomas-Ruþiã, 1983; Roberston, 2000). However, because Arabic has a definite article while Chinese does not, the Arabic speakers seem to develop a more target-like representation of the earlier than the Chinese speakers. The Chinese speakers confirmed acquisition stages proposed by Thomas (1989), while the Arabic speakers seem to associate a in introductory contexts (I had a friend named Tom) before existential contexts (That is a truck) and this is hypothesized to be a result of L1 transfer. This study concludes by illustrating the development using Huebner's semantic wheel to map out both groups' form-function relationships over time (Butler, 2002; Huebner, 1983) and suggesting that the article acquisition stages proposed are not as universal as previously thought (Master, 1995; Thomas, 1989), but actually differ based on features in the learner's L1
