The Acquisition Of Measure Words By Second Language Learners Of Chinese

Measure word takes a very important role in Chinese lexical and grammaticalsystem, since its abundance makes one of the major characteristics of the Chineselanguage. However, measure word teaching does not draw enough attention, and is areal challenge in teaching Chinese as a second language.This paper tries to explore the acquisition of measure words by adult secondlanguage learners of Chinese, through analyzing the relevant data from the HSKComposition Corpus and questionnaire distributed to learners of different levels.According to the investigation, although learners do make improvement as time goeson, those at intermediate and advanced levels still do not perform well enough whenusing measure words, and there is a notable correlation between students’ overallChinese levels and their levels of vocabulary knowledge of measure words. The paperalso summarizes the measure words acquired by most learners at different learningstages, analyzes a number of semantic and syntactic problems in using measure words.Semantically,“One noun, several possible measure words” and “One measure wordsuits several nouns” pose a great challenge for the learners; syntactically, differentcontexts may result in different selection of measure words, which causes anotherdifficulty for the learners.Based on the main findings of the research, some pedagogic suggestions areoffered, for example, the distinction between synonymic measure words need to becovered, common collective measure words may be introduced while teaching thespecific measure word for a noun, and among others.