Article use varies widely among the languages of the world. Some languages, such as French, have six articles while others have none—Japanese, for example. English has three main articles, and they tend to cause a lot of problems for English language learners! Our new Articles lesson aims to simplify English article usage by providing charts and examples that make it easy for your students to tell the difference between a, an, and the. (more…)

Many languages don’t have articles, so English language learners often struggle with using a or the. Over the years, I’ve found that presenting articles (also called “determiners”) in a chart like the one below helps students see which one to use and why. When students are getting frustrated, remind them that it could be worse—they could be learning a language like French that has male/female and singular/plural articles, too!

Chart:

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