Teaching articles: How students can master the French determiner system
Stacey L. Katz · The French review · 2001
This article discusses why students of French have difficulty mastering the French determiner system. Concentrating on definite, indefinite, and partitive articles, it provides pedagogical guidelines to aid instructors in presenting this topic as well as a series of activities to be used in class. The activities are based on Lee and VanPatten's theory of structured input and output, Swain's conception of metatalk and some general applications of low-level discourse analysis. I explain that if students are led to induce the linguistic concepts of identifiability and countability, they will gain an understanding of how to use articles correctly in discourse.