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wormholes101
Joined: 11 Mar 2003
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 Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:29 pm Post subject: Teaching countable and uncountable |
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I was teaching countable and uncountable to some students recently. The materials I was using suggested breaking down uncountable nouns into groups such as food, very small things and liquids.
While this is quite useful at a beginners level, I thought that there must be a more general all encompassing rule that defines one or the other. After some thought, I came up with this: If an item is normally divisible and in use is frequently divided into smaller pieces (wood, oil, chicken meat), then it is uncountable. If it is not normally divided into smaller pieces (a person, a house, a chair) then it is countable.
What do you think? Can you think of any examples that break this rule? |
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saw6436
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Daejeon, ROK
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| Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2009 7:01 pm Post subject: |
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| I always teach in terms of Family names. You have one family (vegetables) that is broken up into different members (carrots, etc...) It isn't perfect but it helps younger/lower-level students get their head around the Count/Un-Count thing. |
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Reise-ohne-Ende
Joined: 07 Sep 2009
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 1:50 pm Post subject: |
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Mmm...I'm not sure I understand what you mean, saw6436. Vegetables are countable too. "One vegetable, two vegetables..."
As far as how to help your students, I actually think the way you explained it is ingenious. It's a very difficult concept to explain to nonnative speakers of English.
This is a good website on the subject:
http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/nouns-un-countable.htm
Hope that helps![/b] |
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cruisemonkey
Joined: 04 Jul 2005
Location: Hopefully, the same place as my luggage.
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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| saw6436 wrote: |
| It isn't perfect but it helps younger/lower-level students get their head around the Count/Un-Count thing. |
... I'm not Dracula. 
Let's talk about moluscs with eight 'arms' -
Student: "Teacher, teacher... they are not arms, they are legs."
CM: "No... because octopusses can make themselves neutrally boyant, octopi do not walk on them."  |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 10:18 pm Post subject: |
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| wormholes101 wrote: |
I was teaching countable and uncountable to some students recently. The materials I was using suggested breaking down uncountable nouns into groups such as food, very small things and liquids.
While this is quite useful at a beginners level, I thought that there must be a more general all encompassing rule that defines one or the other. After some thought, I came up with this: If an item is normally divisible and in use is frequently divided into smaller pieces (wood, oil, chicken meat), then it is uncountable. If it is not normally divided into smaller pieces (a person, a house, a chair) then it is countable.
What do you think? Can you think of any examples that break this rule? |
No, I can't. I think that's the core of it.
If you can divide something into smaller pieces and yet the smaller things remain the same thing, then that something is uncountable; and if not, not. So if you cut a piece of wood into two, you get two pieces of wood; but if you cut a TV into two, you don't get two TVs. Kids shouldn't have any problem getting that.
They're probably not going to be ready for more abstract explanations involving the idea of 'substance' or 'essence' versus 'individual functioning unit'; but I'm not sure I find it actually helpful to use big words like that either.
If you don't teach the underlying logic behind the countable/uncountable distinction I think it can get confusing for kids later on when a noun which they first encountered in an uncountable sense crops up in a countable sense, or vice versa. It looks like the same noun, but, because it's switched from one type to another, it has a different meaning. With a word like 'wood', there's no chance of confusion, because the natural indivisible units in which 'wood' occurs already have the good old English word 'trees' assigned to them. With 'TV' also, there's small chance of confusion, both because the 'essence of TV' we refer to with the uncountable word 'television' has the quite distinct sense of 'the medium of television' (rather than a TV box unit); and because this is just not a word they will need to use until quite a lot later. However, there are lots of common words they need to use right away which do have distinct countable and uncountable senses, the distinction between which may not be apparent. The most obvious examples are the names of foods.
So, for example, 'an ice-cream' generally means an ice cream cone, a distinct unit; but 'ice cream' without the indefinite article (i.e. with null determiner), is just the substance in general in no particular amount or portion. Similarly, 'a coffee' is not the same as 'coffee', 'an apple' is not the same as 'apple' and so on. Since there's not much practical difference in everyday conversation between these two senses, teachers often don't bother with them, and kids generally don't notice them, but, later on, if a student starts to try and figure out which words are uncountable or uncountable they could easily get confused, especially if all they learned from the teacher was that 'liquids are uncountable'.
Another danger, of course, is that students will never move beyond an at best hazy grasp of the distinction, resulting in odd sentences like 'I like apple' (ok, not quite right but perfectly understandable), or 'I like car' (now I'm not sure if it means cars in general or a particular car, and my brain is automatically groping blindly for an ethereal sense of 'car' as some kind of 'essence or spirit of car').
I guess the answer is teach the distinction but keep it simple, short, and concrete, so the rule you mention sounds about right. The concept of number is very important to English grammar, and even to how we think, so as teachers we should pay attention to the issue. |
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cruisemonkey
Joined: 04 Jul 2005
Location: Hopefully, the same place as my luggage.
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 10:54 pm Post subject: |
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Simple is best. After a quick review of 'singular' and 'plural':
Count nouns - plural.
Non-count nouns - singular.
Q:
"Where are the cookies?"
"Where is the salt?"
A:
"They are on the table."
"It is on the table." |
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yingwenlaoshi
Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Location: ... location, location!
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 3:37 am Post subject: |
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countable: 셀 수 있는 (sel su inneun); 셀 수 있다 (sel su itda)
uncoutable: 셀 수 없는 (se su omneun); 셀 수 없다 (sel su optda)
Use your imagination after that. They catch on pretty fast. |
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