A common issue arising in international scientific communication concerns the use of zero, indefiniteand definite articles in English. While existing pedagogical approaches are successfully used to teach near-native competency in the use of English articles, the final stage of native-equivalent competency continues to evade even advanced ESL / EAP students, especially those whose first language (e.g. Russian) does not possess articles. Therefore, the present work is aimed at developing a conceptual approach to article use based on a consideration of the development of context in scientific communication. A literature review of some existing theoretical approaches shows a clear development from semantic and transformational-grammatical attitudes towards more pragmatic explicatory strategies based on dialogic communication. A qualitative content analysis of article errors appearing in the text of research papers written by Russian scientists and corrected by a native English editor revealed the presence of nine major article-related error types, of which the use of zero article with singular NPs instead of the definite article (SxØ√D) was the most common. NPs in sentences containing article errors were also evaluated according to Bickerton’s NP semantic function typology, Hawkins’ location theory and Liu and Gleason’s major types. The hypothesis that Russian scientists, being highly educated, would generally tend to overuse the, a and an in an overcompensation for the tendency of less-well-educated Russians to drop articles when using English was not confirmed by the results of the content analysis. The analysis of articleuse error types appearing in different sections of an IMRaD research paper showed that errors related to the overuse and underuse of the definite article the are particularly characteristic of the Introduction section. However, the largest number of article-related errors were found in the Discussion section, where the SxØ√D error significantly outweighed other error types as compared with other sections. While existing conceptual approaches to explicating the function of the English article system have limited utility, a comprehensive system has yet to be developed. The authors recommend a dialogic approach for teaching the English article system to non-native speakers in the context of scientific communication.

中文翻译：

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英文文章系统在发展对话语境中的作用：俄罗斯科学的视角

国际科学交流中出现的一个常见问题是使用英文的零，不定和定冠词。虽然现有的教学方法已成功地用于教授使用英语文章的近乎母语的能力，但母语等效能力的最后阶段仍在逃避甚至是高级ESL / EAP学生，尤其是那些母语（例如俄语）不具备的学生文章。因此，本工作旨在基于对科学交流中情境发展的考虑，开发一种文章使用的概念方法。对一些现有理论方法的文献综述表明，从语义和转换语法的态度向基于对话交流的更实用的解释策略有了明显的发展。对俄罗斯科学家撰写的研究论文的文章中出现的文章错误进行定性的内容分析，并由一位本机的英语编辑更正，发现存在九种与文章相关的主要错误类型，其中零文章使用单数NP代替定冠词（SxØ√D）是最常见的。还根据Bickerton的NP语义功能类型学，Hawkins的位置理论以及Liu和Gleason的主要类型对包含文章错误的句子中的NP进行了评估。内容分析的结果并未证实以下假设：受过良好教育的俄罗斯科学家通常会过度使用a和an，这是对受过良好教育的俄罗斯人在使用英语时丢弃文章的趋势的过度补偿。对IMRaD研究论文不同部分中出现的文章使用错误类型的分析表明，与定额文章的过度使用和未充分使用有关的错误是“简介”部分的特别特征。但是，在“讨论”部分发现了最多的与文章相关的错误，与其他部分相比，SxØ√D错误大大超过了其他错误类型。虽然现有的概念性方法可用来阐明英语文章系统的功能，但其实用性有限，但尚未开发出一套完善的系统。作者建议采用对话方式，在科学交流的背景下向非母语人士教授英语文章系统。