A Study Of English-speaking Learners’ Acquisition Of Chinese Noun Classifiers

Quantifier is the unique part of speech of Sino-Tibetan languages, which has a particular position in contemporary Chinese language. As the frequently-used and complexly-typed category of quantifiers, noun classifiers shows great significance, and is also one of the main difficulties in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. In syllabus arrangement, the teaching of noun classifiers has been basically completed in intermediate stage. However, in actual teaching practice, we found that advanced learners’ acquisition of Chinese noun classifiers is still not optimistic.Noun classifiers acquisition study has made some achievements, but is still in the preliminary period. This study refers and improves the previous research method, combines corpus analysis and questionnaire test, chooses English-speaking learners as study subjects, comprehensively inspects the English-speaking learners’acquisition of Chinese noun classifiers from the qualitative and quantitative aspects. Such as the total use of noun classifiers, the collocation of quantifiers and nouns, the difficulty sequence of different kinds of noun classifiers, errors relevant to noun classifiers, learners’subjective judgment of the difficulty of noun classifiers. So this study makes up for a blank of the current domestic study.First, I collected the oral material of6American students’presentations from CIEE program, and then turned the recording into transcript and extracted the effective corpus. Through the statistical analysis, I found the following features. In quantitative terms, the total number of noun classifiers used in the corpus is36, which is rather small, compared with the requirements prescribed by the syllabus. In qualitative terms, several error types appeared in the corpus, which are misusage of noun classifiers, missing of noun classifiers, redundance of noun classifiers, and the misusage or missing of the collocated component. Among all these errors, the generalization of "ge (个)" is the most serious problem. All the results above shows the effect of negative transfer of native language, negative transfer of the target language knowledge and learning strategy of simplifying and avoidance to noun classifiers’acquisition.On this basis, I took a questionnaire test on40English-speaking learners in Institute for International Students, Nanjing University. Through the statistical analysis of the test results, we can draw the following conclusions:(1) There is a positive correlation between acquisition of noun classifiers and learners’Chinese proficiency. The advanced learners do much better than primary and intermediate learners in solving problems relevant to noun classifiers.(2) Learners’ability to master "One noun, several possible measure words" and "One measure word suits several nouns" is not very well. There are several types of errors in their usage, such as the generalization of common noun classifiers, the confusion of near-synonym, the generalization of target language rules, and some errors are repetitive.(3) The difficulties of different kinds of noun classifiers are uneven.(4) Learners’subjective judgments of the difficulty of noun classifiers are roughly identical to the objective error rates.By integrating the results of corpus analysis and questionnaire test, I consider that the main factors which effect English-speaking learners’acquisition of Chinese noun classifiers are the differences between English and Chinese partitive construction, noun classifiers itself’s difficulty to acquire, the Chinese proficiency of learners, the frequency of different noun classifiers, learning strategies, learning environment and so on.According to the above conclusions of the study, some feasible suggestions are offered for teaching and textbook editing.