The purpose of the present study was to investigate Korean EFL learners' judgments of countability of English nouns because a correct judgment of noun countability is a key factor for the appropriate use of English indefinite articles and noun phrases. To investigate the subjects' judgments of noun countability and how they are related to the use of English indefinite articles and noun phrases, fourteen hypotheses were set forth and four task types were designed.Participants were 115 Korean college EFL students and they were given four tasks: a task of judgment of countability of nouns in isolation OCT), a task of judgment of countability of nouns in context (JCC), a fill-in-the-blank task (FB), and an error correction task (EC).Overall the subjects showed a flexible notion of countability. There was a statistically significant difference between their performance of JCI and JCC. There was a positive relation between their judgments of countability in three contexts (isolation, context, and overall context) and their performance on the indefinite articles in FB.There was no relationship between their performance of JCC and OJC (overall judgment of countability) and the indefinite articles in EC.With respect to JCI, a statistically significant difference was found between the performance of the low and advanced learners and between the performance of the intermediate and advanced learners, but it was not found between the performance of the low and intermediate learners.In regard to JCC, no statistically significant difference was found between the performance of the low and intermediate learners and between the performance of the intermediate and advanced learners. A statistically significant difference was found only between the performance of the low and advanced learners.The participants performed better on the count use of concrete nouns than on the noncount use of concrete nouns, whereas they performed better on the noncount use of abstract nouns than on the count use of abstract nouns.There was an interaction between proficiency and the noncount use of concrete nouns, while no interaction was found between proficiency and the count use of abstract nouns. / Department of English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/175519 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Cho, Sookhee |
| Contributors | Riddle, Elizabeth M. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | xiii, 149 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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