A Probe Into The Teaching Strategies Of Chinese Quantifiers For English - Speaking Learners

The Chinese Measure Word is a special lexical category in theSino-Tibetan Language family, with a unique position in the modernChinese. Usually, a noun can’t go without a Measure Word in front of it,which shows the importance of the Measure Word in Chinese language.However, teaching Chinese to foreigners as a second language (TCFSL),the teachers have found that it is difficult to teach the Measure Word tothe Chinese language learners, whose first language is English.Inspired by the idea that TCFSL teachers should teach the studentsbased on the research on the features of the student’s first language, putforward by Anhui Provincial Education Department, I have carried out theresearch on whether it is difficult for the students with their first languageEnglish to acquire the Measure Word of Chinese, what the cause of thedifficulty is and what would be the proper teaching strategy to solve theproblem.Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibet Language family, while English theIndo-European family; Chinese has its Measure Word lexical category,while English don’t. Could these language differences affect the thinkingof the Chinese foreign language learners so that the learners could notacquire the Chinese Measure Word?This essay argues against the Language Relativity, believing thatliving in the same world, the cognition of both the English–speakingpeople and the Chinese-speaking people is the same, which maycontribute to the similarities of the two languages, both of which havetheir respective ways of expressing the quantity in the natural world.However, they also have differences in their own languages which is outof their culture background.Based on the Measure Word classification model by Mr. WangHan-wei, this essay discusses the Chinese Measure Word teachingproblems from the perspective of comparing language similarities andcontrasting language differences, with reference to the result analysis ofthe research data from Chinese second language learners of English. The essay explores the strategies of teaching Measure Words according to thetheory of Second Language Acquisition and the theory of SecondLanguage Grammar Teaching, with the aim of finding out the properstrategies of teaching Chinese Measure Words.