Hong Kong Cantonese ESL Learners’ Interpretation of the Use of Articles for Generic Reference: a Bilingual Perspective

English articles, being some of the most common function words in English, are non-existent in Cantonese. The use of English articles has been regarded as an area of difficulty for many ESL learners. The present paper investigates Cantonese ESL learners’ interpretation of the use of English articles for representing generic reference. Two language tasks, namely a grammaticality judgment task and a truth-value judgment task, were conducted with a total of 57 advanced Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong. It was found that Cantonese ESL learners had confusion about the structures of noun phrases for representing generic reference. Although ZERO + plural was largely recognized, some learners had a tendency to use the + plural or bare singular noun phrases for representing generic reference. The definite generic was largely unnoticed. It is argued that the absence of structural equivalents of English articles and the infrequent use of plural marking in Cantonese interact intricately and result in learners’ problems with the structures. ESL teachers are advised to put more pedagogical efforts onto this area of learner difficulty. Explicit teaching is needed to help Cantonese ESL learners recognize the variant structures used for representing generic reference. © The Author(s) under exclusive licence to National Taiwan Normal University 2022.