ENHANCING THE COMPETENCE IN USING ARTICLES FOR ENGLISH MAJORS THROUGH READING BBC NEWS

Abstract

The study aims to enhance the competence in using English articles for English majors at Thai Nguyen University of Education through reading English news. Forty students were chosen randomly; 20 of them were assigned to the experimental group and the others were put into the control group. The authors studied and analyzed sixty essays written by 60 forth-year English majors at Thai Nguyen University of Education in the first semester of the academic year 2019-2020 in order to identify and categorize article errors. Besides, the experimental group were asked to read one piece of news a day and at the same time identify the articles used in the texts, and then they had to decide the use of each article in its contexts. After that, the experimental group had to make their own e-mindmaps about the article usage and give 5 specific examples extracted from the news and their own examples for each usage. The findings of the research indicated that the number of article errors made by the experimental group decreased significantly while in the control group, the number of article errors decreased unremarkably. This demonstrates that reading BBC news has a positive impact on improving English majors’ competence in using articles.