Noun Countability and English-Language
Pedagogy in Japan: A Re-exploration
Tom GALLY

Linguistic interference, or negative transfer, in the acquisition of
a second language is, by deﬁnition, caused by differences
between the learner’s ﬁrst language (L1) and the second language (L2) being acquired, but not all differences are equal.
Some profound differences between languages, differences thatform the bases for fundamental language typologies, have little
practical effect on language acquisition. In terms of basic sentence structure, for example, English and Japanese—the only two
languages to be considered in detail in this paper—belong tofundamentally different categories, with English being a subjectverb-object (SVO) language, in which the verb typically comes
before the direct object, and Japanese an SOV language, with theverb being sentence-ﬁnal. A related syntactic difference between
the two languages is the position of noun-modifying clauses,with such clauses coming after the head noun in English andbefore it in Japanese. But even though such differences are manifested in most sentences that are spoken or written in the two
languages, they cause no signiﬁcant difﬁculty to speakers of one
language who have set out to learn the other. In fact, it would be
no exaggeration to say that English-L1 speakers learning Japanese, once they have acquired the very basics of the language,
never mistakenly form a Japanese sentence with the main verb
before its direct object, and that Japanese-L1 speakers at a similarlevel never make the corresponding mistake in English. From thepractical perspective of learners, these major typological differences between the languages are trivial.
In contrast, many trivial linguistic differences cause chronic
problems for language learners. The fact that Japanese, for example, makes a phonemic distinction between short and long (or, in85

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some accounts of the language’s phonology, single and double)
vowels, such as that between /koseː/ “individuality” and/koːseː/ “structure,” or that English makes a distinction
between rhotic and lateral liquid consonants, as in /raɪt/ “right”
and /laɪt/ “light,” seems of little consequence linguistically but
causes continuing headaches for adult L1 speakers of one language using the other, even those who have spoken the target
language for decades. At the grammatical level, differences thatare quite simple to explain, such as the distinction in English
between singular nouns to indicate the quantity of one and plural nouns to indicate quantities of two or more, or the use of theJapanese perfective verb form (usually called, somewhat misleadingly, the “past tense”) to indicate completed actions, canalso be chronically difﬁcult for L1 speakers of the other language
to acquire.
Language educators, of course, are well aware of whichparts of a language are most difﬁcult for their students to learn,
and they naturally devote more time and energy to those areas.
The English verb system, for example, contains a fair amount ofmorphological irregularity in the present, past, and perfect forms(go, went, gone; drink, drank, drunk; etc.), and so beginning and
immediate students are often drilled in those forms; as a result,Japanese speakers who have learned English through the standard secondary-school curriculum usually do not have a serious
problem with those verb forms and are generally able to correct
their own careless mistakes. Some areas can be more intractable,
however. For example, the distinction in Japanese grammar
between topic and subject, as represented by the particles wa andga, can be very difﬁcult for adult English-L1 learners of the language to master, just as the distinction in English between deﬁnite and indeﬁnite noun phrases, as represented by the articles
the and a/an, is notoriously difﬁcult for Japanese-L1 learners ofEnglish. These two grammatical distinctions are troublesome
partly because of their complexity; entire books have been written to describe the many categories and exceptions in the usageof Japanese particles and English articles (see, for example,
Chino, 1991; Noda, 1996; Brender, 1989; Higuchi, 2003), something not necessary in the case of English irregular verbs, which
can be listed exhaustively in a few pages. But their intractability
for adult language learners results less from the many special
86THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

cases and more from their close and subtle interaction with discourse issues, particularly the speaker’s assumptions about thelistener’s expectations and/or knowledge.1 Because thoseassumptions depend on the constantly-changing discourse context, it is difﬁcult to reproduce or practice them in simple drills.
One grammatical distinction that has seemed to the author
to be particularly troublesome for Japanese-L1 learners of English is that between countable and uncountable nouns. When,over the past two and a half decades, I have corrected English
texts written by Japanese speakers, the second most common
systematic error, after articles, has seemed to involved noun
countability, and when asked to write about common mistakes
made in English by Japanese speakers I have made countability
one of my main topics (Gally, n.d.; Critical Writing Program,
2005; Gally, 2007). However, I have noticed that other English-L1
language educators in Japan do not seem as concerned about thisissue as I have been, and I have begun to wonder if my focus onnoun countability might have been more of a personal obsession
than a genuinely serious problem for Japanese learners of English.
In this brief, informal study, therefore, I have decided to reexamine the importance of noun countability to the ability ofJapanese learners to write English communicatively and accurately. The language examples considered here are scientiﬁcpapers written in English by ﬁrst-year undergraduates at the
University of Tokyo. These samples were chosen partly because
the students, as a group, can be considered to be successful
products of the orthodox English education system in Japan, thatis, the standard secondary-school curriculum supplemented, inmany cases, by private preparatory-school lessons aimed atenabling the students to pass the entrance examinations of selective universities. The papers are also appropriate samples
because the students had rewritten them several times, so careless errors—that is, the mistakes the students could have corrected themselves—should have been mostly eliminated, leaving
only mistakes that indicate the students’ incomplete acquisitionof English. The results of this very preliminary investigation, it ishoped, will suggest the extent to which noun countability shouldor should not receive greater emphasis in English language education in Japan.
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Context and Meaning
It is somewhat misleading to speak of English nouns as
being countable or uncountable. Rather, as pointed out by Allan(1980), countability is a property of the grammatical context inwhich a noun is used. Most nouns can be used in both countableand uncountable contexts, with some nouns being used moreeasily in one of those contexts than in the other.2 There also exist
contexts in which the countability of a noun cannot be determined.
These three categories can be summarized as follows:

Countable

Uncountable

Undetermined

Grammatical Contexts

ExamplesAfter an indeﬁnite article

a lengthy book; an apple

After another, each, either,every, neither, one

another day; every person

In plural formbooks; several phenomena

In singular form without apreceding article, determiner, or possessiveﬁlled with water; a pieceof equipment

In singular form following
enough, little, much, sufﬁcientenough food; sufficient
explanation

In singular form following
the, this, that, or a possessive

the oversight; that order;
their interest

In singular form after all, no,some

There is no cake on thetable.

Adjectivally in singularform before another noun

an order problem

In titles from which articles
are omitted“Report on Light in Ceiling of Auditorium”

Dictionaries targeted at learners of English often indicate
whether particular headword nouns can be used in countable
contexts, uncountable contexts, or both, but it should be notedthat these are indications only of the general tendency. Many
nouns marked in dictionaries as being in only one countability
category can, in special cases, be used in the other as well. For
example, the names of the chemical elements are indicated in
dictionaries as being uncountable, but in scientiﬁc contexts they88THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

can also be used countably (as in The water molecule contains twohydrogens and one oxygen.). Even singular proper nouns (John,
Russia, etc.), which are generally regarded as uncountable, aresometimes used in countable contexts (He doesn’t look like a John tome.; It would have taken several Polands to defeat a Prussia.).3 Somenouns, though, like the countable chair and cup and the uncountable equipment, are employed by native speakers of English in the
opposite context only in nonce usages (We don’t have enough chair
for a big man like him to sit in.).
Fluent speakers of English, of course, learn the countability
categories of particular nouns not from dictionaries—in fact, dictionaries aimed at native speakers of English do not even indicate countability—but from noting, when hearing or seeing aword used, what countability category is indicated by the context. As in the case of deﬁnite and indeﬁnite articles in English(Gally, 2009c), the countability of nouns is generally ignored in
the school and other prescriptive grammars through which mostEnglish-L1 speakers acquire their conscious knowledge of thelanguage’s grammar. Nevertheless, the countability categoryfavored by any particular noun is remarkably consistent in the
speech and writing of L1 speakers of the same English dialect,suggesting that the category is acquired simultaneously with theword’s pronunciation and meaning.
Countability is important for communication because, whena noun can be used either countably or uncountably, its meaning
is usually different in the two contexts. It is here that countability
raises its greatest difﬁculty for learners of English, for the manner in which the meaning varies can itself vary greatly depending on the particular noun. Occasionally, the countability-dependent meanings can be predicted from the noun’s referent. The
names of animals that are eaten by human beings, for example,
are countable when referring to the entire animal (a chicken; sixmonkeys) but uncountable when referring to the meat of thoseanimals (I don’t like chicken.; People in some countries eat monkey.).
Similarly, names of fruit are countable when referring to whole
fruit (He ate three oranges.) but uncountable when referring totheir ﬂavors or colors (She tasted orange in the cocktail.; Orange waschosen for the wallpaper.).
In many other cases, however, the differences between the
countable and uncountable meanings of any particular noun
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cannot be predicted, as those meanings are peculiar to the noun.
In the following examples, written by the author and taken from
Critical Writing Program (2005), [C] indicates the countableusage and [U] the uncountable:
night [C] the dark period of a particular 24-hour day. I stayed
up two nights to ﬁnish my term paper.
night [U] the period of each 24-hour day when the sky isdark. Night is an exciting time for me.
government [C] the people who have the power to manage
and control a country. The election brought a new government topower.
government [U] the process of managing and controlling acountry. An essential component of a stable society is good government.
language [C] a particular system for communicating
through creative combinations of words and symbols. Few
people speak more than two or three languages.
language [U] the use of words and symbols in creative combinations for communication. Researchers do not yet agree on
whether any nonhuman animals have language.
light [C] a device that produces the medium by which people and animals see. We installed six new lights in the garage.
light [U] the medium by which people and animals see.
There is not enough light in the garage to read.
face [C] the front part of a person’s head. You could see theembarrassment on their faces.
face [U] a person’s honor or reputation. He suffered a serious
loss of face when the project he had sponsored failed.
room [C] an enclosed area inside a building. Our apartment
has four rooms.
room [U] available space. There is no room here for anotherdesk.
interest [C] a topic that one enjoys studying and thinking
about. Her interests include sumo and the history of the saxophone.
90THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

interest [U] a percentage paid or charged on money borrowed or lent. The church does not charge interest for loans to its
members.
order [C] a request to purchase something. The waiter took
seven orders in just ﬁve minutes.
order [U] the state of being arranged in a regular fashion.
The ofﬁce manager wants all documents to be kept in good order.
matter [C] an issue, problem, or task. I have to clear up several
important matters before I can take a vacation.
matter [U] the material of which the universe is made.
Astrophysicists believe that matter originated in the Big Bang.
In some of the examples above, such as language and government, it might seem that each countable-uncountable differenceis similar, that is, merely a difference between a speciﬁc instanceof an entity and that entity in general. However, each case has
unique characteristics. It would be very difﬁcult for a naïve
learner to predict, for example, that if language [U] refers to thegeneral concept then language [C] must refer to a system of communication such as French or Swahili; it would be equally reasonable to guess that language [C] means “a word” or “a message.” Similarly, government [C] might be guessed incorrectly tomean “a particular application of management or control on anational level, such as a law or regulation.” In the case of words
like order and matter, guessing even roughly the meaning in one
countability category from the meaning in the other would be
impossible. In every case, each meaning must be learned separately.
It is true that, when an L2 speaker of English uses a noun in
the wrong countability category, the discourse context is often
sufﬁcient to prevent misunderstanding. In a conversation about
pets, for example, if an L2 speaker says I like cat more than dog, thelisteners will understand, perhaps without even noticing themistake, that the speaker is referring to living animals, not tomeat taken from animal carcasses. In writing, however, such
mistakes can be more serious, as they can make the text seem
awkward, unnatural, or even comical to readers. An academic
paper submitted to a journal with many countability errors, forexample, is likely to be rejected on language grounds alone, even91

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if the content is perfectly understandable.
Furthermore, genuine misunderstandings occasionally canoccur. A few years ago, in a conversation in English about Japanese and American higher education, a Japanese undergraduate
asked me, “I hear that universities in the United States have better scholarship than in Japan. Is that true?” I launched into what
I hoped was a fair-minded response about the difﬁculty of comparing the quality of learning and research between two countries as a whole and about the overall worth of Japanese research
universities in comparison to American. Only when my interlocutor, looking increasingly confused, rephrased his question tomention money did I understand that his intended meaning had
been “ . . . have better scholarships . . . .” Because he had used
the word scholarship in an uncountable context, I had interpreted
the word in its uncountable meaning (“learning and research”);
the student’s intention, though, had been the countable meaning(“money provided to university students to support their studies”).

Countability and English-Language Education
Learners of English who wish to speak and write English as naturally and accurately as possible therefore need to acquire thegrammar and semantics of countability. Speciﬁcally, they need toknow the appropriate syntactic contexts for countable anduncountable usages of nouns, and they need to know eachnoun’s meaning in those contexts. In Japan, the general rules arecovered in the grammatical supplements to some English-Japanese dictionaries and in student grammars of English (such as,
for example, Watanuki, Miyakawa, Sugai, & Takamatsu, 2000,
pp. 81–83), and with practice a diligent student can acquire thoserules adequately. To apply those rules, however, learners musthave learned the preferred countability categories and the countability-dependent meanings of each English noun that they use.
In this regard, English pedagogy has seemed to me to be inadequate. Although the English-Japanese and English-English dictionaries used by Japanese secondary-school students do markthe countability of nouns, many textbooks and vocabulary books
do not. For example, in one of a popular series of vocabulary
books used by students studying for entrance examinations, the92

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nouns room, interest, and order are treated as follows (Hitosugi,2005). (The English words given in brackets are my translationsof the preceding Japanese word or words. Pronunciations, crossreferences, information about other parts of speech, and Japanese translations of example phrases and sentences have been
omitted.)room 空 間 [a space]、場 所 [a place]； 部 屋 [an enclosed area
inside a building]； 余 地 [available space]、可 能 性 [a possibility]. give room to 〜. There is room for 〜. That old chest of
drawers takes up too much room.
interest 利 子、利 息 [a percentage paid or charged on money
borrowed or lent]； 興 味 [a topic that one enjoys studying
and thinking about]、関心 [concern, attention]； 重要性、重大 性 [importance]； 利 益 [a beneﬁt]、た め [a purpose]. aninterest rate. a matter of great interest. I have been paying 3
percent interest on the housing loan.
order 順序 [a sequence]； 秩序 [the state of being arranged ina regular fashion]； 注 文 [a request to purchase something]； 命令 [a command]. in alphabetical order.
A student acquiring vocabulary from this vocabulary book can, if
sufﬁciently sensitive to the differences between countable andcountable nouns, infer from the example phrases and sentencesthat the “available space” meaning of room is uncountable, but noinformation is provided to show that room is countable whenused in the meaning “an enclosed area inside a building.” Similarly, the countability category can be inferred for two senses ofinterest (“concern, attention,” from the second example, and“money paid on a debt,” from the third) and for one sense oforder (“a sequence”), but not for the other senses. In any case,few Japanese secondary school students are knowledgeable
enough about countability categories to make even those inferences.
Of course, grammars, textbooks, dictionaries, and vocabulary books are not the only sources of knowledge about a second
language’s grammar and vocabulary. As students are exposed totheir L2 through reading and listening and as they practice theirskills through speaking and writing, they also acquire knowl93

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edge about the language unconsciously, in a manner similar tothat employed by native speakers. In fact, one might even saythat the goal of second-language education is to give learners
enough basic conscious knowledge about a language so that they
can continue to learn unconsciously through real-life exposure toand use of that language. If an important component of the language can be acquired by intermediate or advanced learners on
their own, then there might be no need to teach and drill it intensively at an earlier stage. On the other hand, if a component of
the language is resistant to unconscious acquisition by adultlearners—as the discourse-dependent usages of particles in Japanese and articles in English seem to be—then explicit explanations and drilling would seem to be necessary if learners are toacquire that component. The purpose of this study, then, is toinvestigate whether countability is a component of the latter
type, that is, to determine whether more attention should be paid
to countability at the beginning and intermediate stages of English-language learning in Japan or whether such additional
efforts are unnecessary.
The texts examined for this study were chosen randomly
from among papers written by ﬁrst-year undergraduate science
students at the University of Tokyo for the Active Learning ofEnglish for Science Students (ALESS) course during wintersemester 2008–2009 and summer semester 2009–2010. During
this required one-semester course, which is taught to groups ofabout 15 students each by 10 English-L1 teachers and is conducted entirely in English, students learn the basics of academic
and scientiﬁc research-paper writing and oral presentation, they
design and implement a simple scientiﬁc experiment, and they
write a research paper in the standard introduction-methodsresults-discussion format about their experiment and give a ﬁveminute class presentation on the same topic. (For more information about the ALESS program, see Gally, 2009a, 2009b.) The
course takes a process-based approach to writing: each section of
the paper is rewritten several times based on in-class peer
review, teacher comments, optional consultations with graduatestudent tutors at a pilot writing center associated with the program, and the students’ own reconsideration of the content; theteachers and tutors do not, as a rule, provide line-by-line error
correction on either the drafts or the ﬁnished papers. These
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papers should therefore be a good representation of the mostaccurate English—that is, the English most free of carelesserrors—that successful products of the Japanese secondary education system can produce. If the papers show that insufﬁcientacquisition of countability seriously interferes with understanding or English-L1-speaker acceptance of the students’ writing,then greater emphasis on countability in English-language education in Japan would seem to be necessary. If, on the other
hand, countability errors are relatively insigniﬁcant, then theissue would presumably not require additional attention.

In Lieu of a Methodology
Because the purpose of this study was assess the current status of a select group of students’ ability with regard to one
aspect of English grammar in light of the author’s previous
impressions of that ability, the method employed was qualitative, even impressionistic. I read through the selected texts carefully, looking for countability errors, especially those that mightinterfere with understanding, and assessed holistically the signiﬁcance of those errors in comparison with other language
issues in the papers, including other grammatical features,vocabulary choice, and naturalness.
To illustrate this (non)methodology, the following is myanalysis of the opening paragraph of one student paper.4 The
nouns that should be countable based on the syntactic context
are marked with a single underline, the uncountable nouns witha double underline, and the undetermined nouns with a wavy
underline. The pronouns one and this are ignored, and acidity inthe phrase “the mode of the distribution and acidity” is marked
with a question mark because it is unclear whether or not thenoun is meant to be modiﬁed by one of the preceding deﬁnite
articles.
The effect of (1)acid rain on (2)plants is widely recognized as
one of the natural (3)phenomena. For example, the destruction of a (4)rain forest has occurred due to this effect. However, the correlation between the degree of (5)acidity and thegrowth of (6)plants, and the exact amount of (7)pH which
exterminates the (8)plants are not clear. In this research, two95

KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION(9)kinds of (10)plants were grown in the different acidity ofliquid for ten (12)days. The (13)results showed the same
shape of (14)distribution of (15)plants stem (16)length, although
there were (17)interrelationship between the mode of the distribution and (?)acidity. This may indicate that there is thestrong individual inﬂuence on (18)plants. The (19)results of thisresearch may be applied to (20)anticipation of (21)productivityof (22)crops under (23)acid rain.
(11)

As indicated by the superscript numbers, 23 nouns in this paragraph are used in countability-determined contexts. For example, (2) and (3) are marked as countable because the nouns areplural and (4) because the noun comes after the indeﬁnite article
a, and (1) and (5) are marked as uncountable because they are
singular nouns without preceding articles, determiners, or possessives.
Several likely grammatical errors involving articles or plurality—factors that are related to countability—can be observed
here. While the judgments of native speakers might vary, mostwould probably agree that, in this context, one of the natural phenomena at (3) should be the indeﬁnite a natural phenomenon; thisshould not be considered a countability error, however, as theplural phenomena can occur after the deﬁnite article the as it does
here. The singular countable a rain forest at (4) is problematic interms of meaning, as it seems to suggest that only one rain forest
has been affected by acid rain; either rain forests or the uncountable rain forest (meaning “rain forests in general”) is probably
more correct in terms of meaning. The plural plants used as a
modiﬁer at (15) should probably be either the singular plant or
the possessive plants’ or the plants’; it is unclear which is meant by
the writer. The insertion of the before both (20) and (21) seems
desirable to me, but the omission of the deﬁnite article in suchcontexts is occasionally seen in edited scientiﬁc writing; in any
case, both anticipation and productivity are normally uncountable,
so their use in their original contexts does not raise any countability issues. (Semantically, prediction would be more appropriate than anticipation.) The only clear countability error in thispassage is (17), as interrelationship is normally countable; because
the verb were is plural, however, it is not clear from this paragraph alone whether the student’s mistake was the use of a sin96

THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

gular countable noun without an article or the omission of theplural sufﬁx -s after interrelationship. In any case, the use of interrelationship as an (apparently) uncountable noun does not seemto be a serious mistake, as no misunderstanding is likely toresult.
In this way, a total of 40 student papers containing about
45,000 words of text were read carefully to assess qualitatively
the frequency and seriousness of countability errors. A handfulof the papers examined were ignored because their overall language level was too low to separate countability issues meaningfully from vocabulary, number, and other problems; for thosestudents, the assigned task seems to have been too challenging
for their current English ability. Another handful of papers had
no serious English problems whatsoever.5 Most of the papers
examined, however, while understandable, exhibited a signiﬁcant number of grammatical and other language errors. The following are 10 typical examples, taken from 10 different papers,with countability errors marked in bold.
( 1 ) To test the relation between the concentration of alcoholand its burning, 99.5% C2H6O was prepared because it ismain component of liquor and new car’s fuel.
( 2 ) Generally, a material that contains larger amount of air ismore efﬁcient at insulating because the heat has more difﬁculty in traveling through the air than through material( 3 ) Through this experiment, they proved that apples secrete
ethylene and it hastens the separation of camellia’s leaves
and stems.
( 4 ) To test whether slug has learning ability, I set up the passage that was divided into two, and I had a slug walk on
this.
( 5 ) The result indicates that battery in lower temperaturesave more electricity.
( 6 ) The result of this experiment shows that spring constantdecreases as diameter of spring’s ring increases, and thisrelationship might be approximated with a power law ofthe diameter.
( 7 ) The vessels got some constant light from ﬂuorescentlamp.
( 8 ) This means that the intermolecular force between mole97

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cule of water and oil is weak.
( 9 ) Theoretical system of thermodynamics shows that speciﬁc heat at constant volume is described as ∂U∂T.
(10) To ﬁnd out the relationship between wavelength of colors
and the absorbance of sunlight, I used glasses, tap water,
origami, and thermometers.
A common characteristic of all of these mistakes is that asingular noun has been used in an uncountable syntactic context
in a meaning which requires a countable or undetermined context. In (1), for example, component in the sense of “a part of alarger whole” is a countable noun and is marked as such inlearners’ dictionaries, but the syntactic context of the nounphrase which it heads—that is, not being preceded by an article,
determiner, possessive, etc.—is appropriate only for uncountablenouns. This same error is repeated in all of the other examples
highlighted above.
The reasons the writers made these particular errors areunclear, but some possibilities come to mind. Several of thenouns, such as amount, constant, diameter, system, and wavelength,
are abstract; learners who have been taught or have noticed on
their own that abstract nouns are more often uncountable thanconcrete nouns are might make the reasonable, though incorrect,
assumption that these nouns are uncountable as well. This
explanation seems particularly likely in the case of (10), because,
as shown by the correct use of glasses in the countable meaning of“a beverage container made of glass,” of tap water and origami inuncountable contexts, and of thermometers countably, the writerseems, in general, quite sensitive to issues of grammatical number and countability.
However, incorrect inference from an noun’s abstractness
would not explain the mistaken uncountable use of the singularslug, battery, and lamp, which refer to concrete objects. In the caseof (5), the use of battery in the singular might be a careless plurality mistake, because the verb that battery controls (“save”) is plural and because the writer used batteries appropriately in othernearby sentences. The omission of The from before theoretical system in (9) might have been careless as well (rather than a mistaken inference from the phrase’s abstract meaning) as the writer
did use the deﬁnite article with the same phrase elsewhere in the98

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paper.
In some cases, the mistakes might have resulted in part fromthe writers using words that they have only recently learned andabout which they have little or no exposure-based knowledge.
Nouns like camellia, slug, and wavelength do not appear on mostword lists used as the basis for high school textbooks, vocabulary books, and university English examinations in Japan, so thewriters might have learned them from Japanese-English dictionaries or online glossaries, which often do not mark countabilityof English nouns, while writing their papers.
Among the papers examined, only one apparent instance ofthe opposite countability error—an uncountable noun used in acountable context—was noted:(11) And, if they [athletes] ﬁnd best movements, they will dobetter performances.
In the context of this paper, which compared the velocity ofbaseballs thrown overhand and underhand, the uncountable performance (“the degree of skill or success with which something isaccomplished”) would be more appropriate than the countable(“a demonstration of skill, art, or entertainment in front of an
audience”). A reader not accustomed to interpreting theintended meanings of countability errors might be misled by thismistake. This was the only instance found, in any of the surveyed texts, of a likely misinterpretation of meaning resulting
from a countability error.

Conclusion
The results of this informal study cast signiﬁcant doubt on
the validity of author’s long-held impression that a relative disregard for noun countability in English education in Japan
results in excessively delayed acquisition of this grammaticalfeature by students who have gone through the standard education system. While countability mistakes were found, they werevastly outnumbered by other errors, and only one case in which
readers might misunderstand the writer’s intention due to a
countability error was noticed. No support was found for a recommendation that greater emphasis should be placed on noun
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countability in beginning or intermediate English-language
instruction to Japanese-L1 learners.
Some other types of errors, though, do raise concerns. Manyof those other mistakes involved matters that are notoriously difﬁcult in any case, such as word choice or deﬁniteness. But, asshown in the examples quoted in this paper, a relatively simple
component of English grammar, one that is related to countability, was involved in a large number of careless mistakes. Thatcomponent is the distinction between singular and plural innouns and verbs and the related issue of number agreement. As
noted by Takada (2004, p. v), even at selective Japanese universities undergraduates who have studied English for six years ormore before entering university frequently make number-agreement and other plurality-related mistakes. The following are a
few examples, each taken from a different ALESS paper:This experiment tested the hypothesis that all ions prevent
apples from being discolored and that nonionic substance
don’t keep apples from being discolored.
Each plants respond just a little to the light.
Therefore, the purpose of this research is to know that ash
have the nature that promotes combustion.
That suggests that the greater amount of light more strongly
inhibit the stalks to grow.
Also, the spiders tends to move quickly and rip holes on the
web after consumption [of] alcohol.
Komaba also use much energy for research and education.
In spite of that, Komaba seems as cool as parks.
The frequency of these number mistakes can be explained by thefact that Japanese does not mark most nouns for number and has
no number marking of verbs at all; in other words, the lack ofgrammatical number in Japanese interferes with learners’ acquisition of that component in English. However, unlike the semantic component of noun countability, the complexity of which
necessarily delays its acquisition, number agreement in English
100THE CULTURES OF WRITING CENTERS

is, for the most part, simple, even mechanical. Particularly intexts that are repeatedly revised, as in the case of the papers
written for the ALESS class, it should be possible for students toeliminate nearly all such number agreement errors on their own.
The fact that they do not suggests that more practice in the rulesof English grammatical number is needed at the high school anduniversity levels. Such practice might improve writing accuracy
in the closely related area of countability as well.

Notes
1. Stated brieﬂy, one major discourse-dependent difference between wa
and ga hinges on the writer or speaker’s assessment of what the reader
or listener expects to be told at that point in the discourse, while amajor difference between the and a/an hinges on an assessment of what
the reader or listener already knows. It seems that native speakers of
one language, habituated to assessing unconsciously in real time either
the listener’s current desired knowledge or current actual knowledge,ﬁnd it very difﬁcult to acquire the ability to make the opposite assessment automatically as required by the other language.
2. In the paper cited, Allan describes several countability tests that, whenapplied to the use of nouns in his dialect of English, imply the existence of eight levels of countability. For the sake of simplicity, andbecause, as Allan notes, the exact number of levels is likely to vary
among dialects, in the present study I will speak only of countable anduncountable contexts, ignoring the ﬁner gradations, and will use theterms “countable noun” to refer to “a noun that, in a particular sense,is normally used only in countable contexts” and “uncountable noun”
to mean “a noun that, in a particular sense, is normally used only inuncountable contexts.”
3. Allan (1980) argues that, once it is used in a countable context, a nounceases to be a proper name, as it no longer “uniquely labels and guarantees the existence of the referent or set of referents (in either the realor a ﬁctional world).”
4. The authors of all papers examined for this study gave written permission for their texts to be used and quoted in studies such as this aslong as their anonymity is preserved.
5. Because of academic issues related to grading and to the lower-division
students’ competition for promotion to the upper division, it is notpossible to track ALESS students into different classes according totheir language ability. While the ALESS curriculum does seem to beappropriate in terms of difﬁculty for most of the students, a minority

101KOMABA JOURNAL OF ENGLISH EDUCATION

would probably be better off in more basic classes. In contrast, a few
students possess native or near-native English ability, often because
they have received at least part of their education in schools, either inJapan or elsewhere, where the language of instruction was English.
Although the course is not challenging for these students in a linguistic sense, it is nevertheless hoped that they beneﬁt from exposure to
new knowledge regarding the structure of scientiﬁc papers and othertopics covered in the course.

References
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