Effects of Noun Countability Perception on Selection of Grammatical Articles

Effects of Noun Countability Perception on Selection of Grammatical Articles

This article examines Korean EFL learners' perceptions of noun countability and how itinfluences their accuracy in grammatical article selection. From a learner corpus, 24 nouns wereidentified as particularly problematic in terms of article error which were then used to constructa survey eliciting university students' responses to whether the nouns were countable or not(including whether their answer was informed by school knowledge or intuitions). The surveywas also given to native speaking instructors. Based on the survey results, the words wereranked along the level of disagreement between instructors and students. The five words forwhich there was the most disagreement were examined in-depth, as were words from theopposite end of the spectrum. What was revealed was a lack of mastery of the word form itself;words that are formally only nouns were used in non-nominal slots, suggesting that knowledgeof countability occurs at a later stage of development.