An Experimental Study Of Teaching English Count And Mass Nouns

Number is a universal existing grammar category in English language. According to thedivision of traditional English grammar, English nouns can be divided into common nounsand proper nouns. And the former can be further classified into count nouns and mass nouns.The features of count nouns are that they can be modified by definite or indefinite articles,and they have the plural forms. By contrast, the features of mass nouns are that they cannot bemodified by indefinite articles but by definite articles and indefinite quantifiers, without theplural forms. However, this kind of traditional binary theory on the number of English nounsbrings Chinese students a great deal of confusion. They do not understand why some nounscan sometimes be used as both a count noun and a mass noun. The only way they can use is toremember the exceptions by heart. But by doing this again and again, the burden of theirmemorization will be aggravated, which makes more and more Chinese students dislikeEnglish. In the light of this phenomenon, the author tries to distinguish count nouns frommass nouns by applying Bounding Theory and the related three attributes of internalhomogeneity, replicability and contractibility/expansibility. What’s more, under theperspective of cognition, the efficiency of learning English count and mass nouns can beenhanced gradually.The present study utilizes Cognitive Linguistic approach and traditional teaching methodrespectively to carry out an experiment on freshmen English majors, School of ForeignLanguages, Xihua University about the distinction between English count nouns and massnouns. And the aim of this study is to examine whether Cognitive Linguistic approach is moresuperior to the traditional teaching method in teaching English count nouns and mass nouns.Experimental subjects are divided into experimental group and control group. Experimentalcontents consist of the conversion between count nouns and mass nouns, the countability ofnouns with dual meanings, the countability of collective nouns as well as English translationexercises. Cognitive teaching refers to Bounding Theory, internal homogeneity, replicabilityand contractibility/expansibility. By contrast, in addition to the rules of count nouns and massnouns, traditional teaching method also attaches much attention to the exceptions about nouns.Experimental results demonstrate that subjects taught by the Cognitive Linguistic approachperform better than those taught by the traditional teaching method in learning count nounsand mass nouns. Under the guidance of Cognitive Linguistic approach, foreign languageteaching can bring learning interest and learning proficiency for foreign language learners. Wethink that experimental results also have some implications on teaching other English grammars for foreign language learners.