The study has two main goals: to assess in part the effects of current definite article instruction at the tertiary level in the Serbian L1/English L2 environment, and to analyze whether the use of the definite article in English could be represented by figure/ground alignment in the instruction process. One of the questionnaires used (consisting of fill-in-the-blank tasks) was meant to rate the participants' L2 definite article production in the contexts for its obligatory use. Another

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... naire consisted of illustrations of figure/ground alignment as cues for a translation task meant to assess whether the definite article would be used in situations where the referent of choice was presented as the figure. An analysis of the data indicated that the participants, who displayed various levels of knowledge of definite article use on the first questionnaire, scored identical (successful) results when establishing a link between the use of the definite article and figure/ground alignment. These results could prove useful for innovating the L2 instruction process in the Serbian L1/English L2 environment.