Chinese Students' Acquisition Of Chinese Quantifiers And Teaching Research

Classified into the same Sino-Tibetan language family,both Chinese and Burmese have classifiers,but their degrees of development are different,each with its own characteristics.Chinese belongs to developed classifier language while Burmese belongs to quasi-developed one.This results in the Myanmar students difficulty in accquisiton of those Chinese classifier.But so far,the comparison between the Chinese and Burmese classifiers as well as the research on classifiers teaching of have not been paid much attention.Therefore,this kind research is still in exploratory and still lack of theoretical bases.In this thesis paper,we maily discuss about the similarities and differences of the Chinese and Burmese classifiers,the acquisition of Chinese classifiers in Myanmar students,and the methods for teachers to improve the learning effect of Myanmar students in acquisiton of Chinese classifiers.First of all,based on the comparative theory of linguistics,linguistic typology and cognitive semantics theories,this paper makes a comparative analysis of the classification,semantic features and grammatical characteristics of Chinese and Burmese classifiers,which provides the linguistic references for the study of error analysis and teaching method for Myanmar students.By comparing classifiers in the two languages,we found out that the classifiers of Chinese and Burmese have the same characteristics of being monosyllabic,relatively closed and semantically multifunctional.The classifiers of the both languages also have adhesive property and they can't stand alone.The classifiers must be combined with numerals,descriptive pronouns,or interrogative pronouns to serve as syntactic structures.Secondly,the development of Chinese and Burmese classifiers varies,and the main differences are as follow:(1)Chinese has no echo classifiers but Burmese has certain number of echo classifiers.The echo classifiers has the connecting effect in the development of individual classifiers.In general,the language with no echo classifiers is in the developed stage,but on the Contrary,the language with echo classifiers is in the quasi-developed stage.(2)The semantic focus of "quantity" in Chinese and Burmese is different.In the aspect of noun classifiers,the semantic meaning of Chinese is focused on the "shape" of things,while the Burmese focuses on the category attributes of things.In terms of verbal classifiers,Chinese has both"quantity" and "time”semantic features,while in Burmese there is only one verbal classifier of both "quantity" and "time".(3)In Chinese,classifiers with additive meanings are more abundant than those in Burmese.Some classifiers in Chinese can be embodied in semantic colors by means of analogue coding schemes,which isn't available in the Burmese language instead.In terms of verbal classifiers,Burmese does not have any additional semantic color,and some situational classifiers in Chinese have a certain color meaning.In the Second place,the quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted in this paper and to conduct a questionnaire survey on 99 Myanmar students who used Chinese as a second language.Through the analysis of the types of error in the survey results,the proportion of semantic errors is the highest,accounting for 52.5%of the total error rate,followed by grammatical errors,accounting for 25%,while the cognitive errors in the total deviation accounted for the least proportion,22.5%.The three main causes of errors are negative transfer of mother tongue,excessive generalization of target language and the influence of both teachers and textbooks.Thirdly,we did an overall stastic comparison between the classifiers in the Chinese textbook and those in the outline of Chinese words and Chinese characters level.We found out that Chinese and Outline the rate of coincidence reaches up to 71%,which is so basically in line with the requirements of outline.However,from the perspective of language teaching,there are still some problems:the lower frequency of reproduction,the lack of some Chinese classifiers characteristic,as well as the problem in designing classifiers worksheets and so on.Aiming at these problems we also provide some suggestions on compiling classifiers in Chinese textbooks.Finally,on the basis of the above three aspects,the classifiers are divided into different difficulty grades,and the effective teaching suggestions are also put forward.The noun classifiers and verb classifiers are disscussed respectively in this paper.In terms of noun classifiers,according to the difficulty level of Stockwell(1965a,1965b),the difficulty is divided into four grades:semantics coressponding classifiers,specific Chinese classifiers,classifiers with low degree of semantic differentiation and classifiers with high degree of semantic differentiation.Teachers should cultivate three abilities in the teaching process:the semantical cognitive ability of noun quantifiers and nouns collocation,the ability of differentiate the classifiers,and the ability of select tht classifiers accurately in the dynamic context.In terms of verbal classifiers,the difference between Chinese and Burmese is relatively large.Burmese has a limited number of verbal classifiers,semantic types of which are also relatively simple,so it is difficult to distinguish their difficulty levels.Therefore,according to their semantic features,Chineses verbal classifiers are classified into two groups:loan verbal classifiers and dedicated verbal classifiers.The teachers have to make sure that the students understand the differences in usage and semantic meaning of these verbal classifiers.Teachers can strengthen the Myanmar students'understanding and mastery of Chinese verbal classifiers by means of contrastive teaching meathods.This study enriches the cases of cross-language comparative study,and provides a certain research perspective for the acquisition and teaching of Chinese classifiers.It also provides effective suggestions for the teaching of Chinese classifiers in Myanmar.