In this paper an attempt is made to find out whether Persian EFL learners facing article use in English perform better in the recognition or production of the articles. It is also suggested that articles cross¬linguistically might encode definiteness or specificity. Next, an Article Choice Parameter is proposed, which governs whether articles in a given language are distinguished on the basis of definiteness or on the basis of specificity. To clarify this point, definiteness/specificity variation in both Persian and English languages are studied firstly within each of these languages and secondly among the two. The findings show that difficulty in distinguishing between definiteness and specificity is the major problem in English article use among Persian learners of English while, they perform better in recognition than comprehension of the articles.
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