This longitudinal study examines the acquistion of English articles by
three 6-year-old, second language learning children whose native tong
ue is Chinese, a language without articles. Brown's coding scheme and
an extended coding scheme were used in scoring the corpora of the chil
dren's responses to a Syntax Elicitation Task. Results revealed that t
he Chinese children's acquistion of the definite article differed from
what had been previously found using Brown's coding scheme with Engli
sh as first language learners and second language learning children of
other native language origins. Chinese children's use of the definite
article developed through an unmarked phase, a referential place-hold
ing phase, a marked phase, and a referential substitution phase before
the definite article was fully acquired. The acquisition of the indef
inite article, on the other hand, was similar to the acquisition patte
rn already reported for children learning English as a first language
or as a second language. It is suggested that referential place-holdin
g, as well as referential substitution, might not be a Chinese-specifi
c second language learning phenomenon; rather, they might be derived f
rom a universal referential strategy for learning articles.