Teaching English noun countability: a cognitive grammar approach  

Oleh:

Aryani, Benita ; Wijaya, David

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: CONEST 12: The Twelfth Conference on English Studies, Jakarta, Unika Atma Jaya, page 43-48.
Topik: Cognitive Grammar; the count-mass distinction; boundedness; ELT teaching materials
Fulltext: 43-48.pdf (98.98KB)

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 406 CES 12 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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Isi artikel

The concept of noun countability in English poses great difficulty to both EFL and ESL learners alike, especially learners whose first language sees entities differently from English. Traditionally, instruction on this concept comprises an exhaustive list of countable and uncountable nouns and rote-memorization of the list. Cognitive Grammar proposes an alternative view of the English count-mass distinction. Rather than having learners rote-memorize the list, it teaches learners to construe entities as either bounded or unbounded. This paper reports the positive results of an experimental study investigating the effectiveness of incorporating a Cognitive Grammar presentation of the target grammatical concept in an Indonesian EFL classroom. Sixteen Indonesian EFL learners (initially twenty three subjects) aged 16-17 participated in the experiment. They received forty five minutes of instruction on the concept. The study used a pretest-posttest design to measure the effectiveness of this pedagogical treatment. The tests contained forty numbers of forced choice tasks. A Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was run to analyze the data. Results show that the participants had significant gains from pre to posttest.Learners could make use of the concept presented through a cognitive presentation to determine the countability of English nouns. The pedagogical implication is that English teachers could use this method as an effective alternative to teach English countable and uncountable nouns. The findings lend support to the applicability of Cognitive Grammar theory in second language instruction.

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