Abstract
This article reports on changes in EFL learners' article choice performance before and after receiving lessons on the main rules applicable to article usage combined with dictionary consultation guidance. A sample of 43 Korean college students undertook the same forced-choice elicitation task once as a diagnostic test and again as a post-intervention test at three-month intervals. Unlike the diagnostic test, in which the participants were only asked to choose the correct articles, the post-intervention test asked them to give written accounts of their decision-making procedures as well. The analyses of the diagnostic test results, specifically the items requiring the indefinite article or the zero article, demonstrated EFL learners' struggle with indeterminate nominal numbers, underlining the importance of clear lexicographic treatment of such information. Further, the post-intervention test and the written think-aloud data analyses suggested that although using a bilingualised dictionary for nominal countability is useful in general, dictionary consultation can sometimes impede users from using articles correctly. Specific problem areas are discussed.
Highlights
Correct article usage is difficult for learners of English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) to master, especially when their mother tongue (L1) does not contain the corresponding function system (García Mayo 2008, Ionin et al 2008, Mizuno 1999)
To bridge this research gap, this study explores how Korean EFL learners use a bilingualised dictionary to retrieve the needed nominal countability information and what difficulties they encounter along the way
The overall mean score improved meaningfully on the post-intervention test, participants' performance level differed sharply depending on "what purpose the noun is used for" and "whether required countability information (RCI) is provided for the target noun." Table 1 summarizes the participants' performance according to the nature of the target noun defined by the purpose, the lexicographic treatment of RCI for the nouns used for classification purposes, and the reference types of the nouns used for identification purposes
Summary
Correct article usage is difficult for learners of English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) to master, especially when their mother tongue (L1) does not contain the corresponding function system (García Mayo 2008, Ionin et al 2008, Mizuno 1999). The numbers of other nouns such as atmosphere or the viral infection cold are not so obvious, and these nouns are often paired with deviant article choices in EFL writing Because they lack a clear understanding that the notion of countability is supposed to be understood in a grammatical — not mathematical — sense, many EFL learners try to determine the countability of the noun in question by visualizing themselves finger-counting the "item," rather than by looking for the information in a dictionary (Xue 2010). They almost never put an before atmosphere because an atmosphere sounds almost as peculiar as two atmospheres. Correct article usage can be extremely difficult for Korean EFL learners, whose L1 lacks an article system and a singular–plural morphology
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