Exploring the acquisition of countable and uncountable nouns in EMI and FI contexts

The present study aims to explore the acquisition and mental representation of
the countable and uncountable noun distinction in English as a foreign language
(EFL) by two upper-intermediate Catalan/Spanish groups in two different learning
contexts, formal instruction (FI) and English-Medium Instruction (EMI) (Coleman
2006; Izumi 2013), in contrast with baseline native speaker data, and with an in-
terest in crosslinguistic influence. The FI group receives fewer hours of exposure
to EFL, 3 per week, but in return, instruction on the phenomenon under study. In
contrast, the EMI group is immersed in EFL, receiving 15-20 hours per week in the
classroom, but receives no instruction on the phenomenon in question. Data were
collected by means of two experimental tasks: one grammaticality judgment task
and one picture-decision task. The results show that, although there is no signif-
icant difference between learning context overall, there are differences when the
data are considered at the level of the noun-type. The lack of impact resulting from
FI adds further evidence to the existing discussion related to explicit (FI) versus im-
plicit (EMI) instructional contexts (Dafouz & Guerrini 2009; Pérez-Vidal 2009; 2011).
In addition, these findings underscore the difficulty in the acquisition of countable
and uncountable noun type distinctions at upper-intermediate levels.