A Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Indefinite Article Use

English articles occur as the most frequent function words, and their accurate use is often taken as one of the key indicators of English learners‘ language proficiency. Trivial as they are, English articles are deemed to be the most complicated lexical items from both the linguistic and language learning perspective. It is well established that English articles pose a great challenge to English learners, particularly those whose mother tongues lack articles, like Chinese(White, 2009). Up to date, however, not many empirical studies have probed into the role of countability played in non-native speakers‘ use of English indefinite article exclusively, and not to mention the empirical studies which merely take the instruction of indefinite article use from semantic boundedness of abstract nouns in EFL classrooms into consideration.Thus, in light of Amuzie and Spinner‘s(2013) study, the present study was conducted to make clear whether Chinese EFL learners are sensitive to the heterogeneity in the countability of abstract nouns through their indefinite article use with abstract nouns. At the same time, it also furthers in how to better EFL learners‘ use of indefinite article with abstract nouns through different approaches of instruction, either in cognitive teaching approach or in traditional rule-based teaching approach. The subjects, who were eighty-one freshmen of non-English majors from two parallel classes at one university in Suzhou, participated in our experiment through a forced-elicited choice task and a semi-translation task. This study intends to answer the two questions as follows: 1. What are the effects of different types of abstract nouns on Chinese EFL learners‘use of indefinite article? 2. Does instruction make a difference in helping Chinese EFL learners with their use of indefinite article? If yes, what are the differences?With careful analysis of the collected data, major findings of the present study are summarized as follows:Firstly, Chinese EFL learners‘ indefinite article use differs with regard to the types of abstract nouns. The accuracy rate of the subjects‘ indefinite article use ranks as the following order: T4(independently bounded nouns) > T1(static nouns) >T2(continuous action nouns) > T3(non-continuous action nouns). The accuracy rate is much higher for polar bounded abstract nouns than vaguely bounded ones. Besides, the subjects don‘t know the heterogeneous nature within abstract nouns exactly.Secondly, instruction does make a difference in helping Chinese EFL learners with their use of indefinite article. Different approaches of abstract nouns exert different effects on EFL learners‘ indefinite article use: in terms of the immediate effects of instruction, both cognitive teaching approach and traditional rule-based teaching approach help improve learners‘ indefinite article use with abstract nouns except for the latter one can‘t deal with T3/non-continuous action nouns. But seen from the delayed effects of these two approaches, there are statistically significant differences between them: the traditional rule-based teaching approach can only help subjects tackle their use of indefinite article with the polar bounded and unbounded nouns in the long run. However, the effects on the subjects‘ indefinite article use under cognitive teaching approach are everlasting and the improvement is holistically obvious because the subjects had acquired the distinctive essence of semantic boundedness within abstract nouns. What‘s more, the cognitive teaching approach based on boundedness and other corresponding cognitive features is more effective for learners to better their indefinite article use in overall abstract nouns either in the short or long run, compared with the traditional rule-based teaching approach.Research findings of present study are expected to shed some lights on the acquisition and instruction of English indefinite article use as well as its corresponding researches on the countability of abstract nouns.