A Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Nominal Classifiers By German-Speaking Learners At Elementary And Intermediate Levels

Previous studies have shown that the acquisition of Chinese nominal classifiers has a high rate of errors. The error rate of European and American learners is higher than that of Japanese and Korean learners. There appears to be a correlation between the acquisition of nominal classifiers and language proficiency, as learners at elementary and intermediate levels exhibit more errors than do advanced learners. Of the studies on European and American learners’ acquisition of nominal classifiers, few were conducted on German-speaking learners. The only study involving German-speaking learners was a questionnaire survey concerning a limited number of nominal classifiers. The present study is a comprehensive analysis of elementary-and intermediate-level German-speaking learners’ acquisition of nominal classifiers. The significance of this research stems from its provision of a valuable reference resource for basic-stage language teaching of students with the specific German-speaking linguistic background.The first chapter describes the significance of research, the current research status concerning the classification of nominal classifiers, the semantics and cognition of nominal classifiers, and the acquisition and pedagogy of nominal classifiers. It then formulates research questions according to the research purpose, and introduces the research plan, which included corpus retrieval, questionnaire survey and statistic analysis.The second chapter is corpus-based analysis of German partitive nouns. Use cases and use frequency of German partitive nouns were acquired through information retrieval of German native corpus, compared with that of Chinese nominal classifiers, and taken as the basis for the analysis of classifier acquisition and influential factors.The third chapter is corpus-based acquisition analysis of nominal classifiers. Use cases and use frequency of interlanguage nominal classifier use were acquired through the information retrieval of interlanguage corpus, and analyzed. Correlation analysis was conducted on the basis of corpus frequency; correlation between interlanguage use frequency and frequency of German partitive nouns and Chinese nominal classifiers was examined, and the influences of mother tongue and target language input-frequency on the acquisition of nominal classifiers were explored.The fourth chapter is based on questionnaire survey. First, on the basis of results from semantic judgement test, noun-classifier matching test and grammar judgement test, the acquisition of nominal classifier semantics, noun-classifier matching and grammar items by German-speaking learners at elementary and intermediate levels was analyzed. Second, on the basis of accuracy results of noun-classifier matching test, item difficulty and category difficulty of nominal classifiers and acquisition characteristics of German-speaking learners at elementary and intermediate levels were analyzed. Last, through correlation analysis among accuracy and nominal classifier and noun frequency, the influence of target language frequency was examined; on the basis of factorial analysis of six tests, the influence of semantic factors was analyzed; through correlation analysis between accuracy results and German partitive noun frequency, the influence of mother tongue was examined; and, finally, additional influential factors on the acquisition of nominal classifiers were summarized.The fifth chapter presents the conclusions and provides suggestions. The findings of this research and the conclusions derived are summarized below.(1) Learners have a certain degree of acquisition on nominal classifiers’ semantics, matching and grammar. Learners have certain semantic generalization ability, and their acquisition of nominal classifiers do not entirely rely on rote memorization. In the acquisition of noun-classifier matching, frequently used items, concrete items, animate items, and items of salient shapes have relatively higher levels of acquisition, whereas abstract items have relatively lower levels of acquisition. Learners can efficiently identify errors in classifier redundancy and omission of numeral-classifier phrases, have considerable levels of judgement accuracy of noun-classifier matching, but have low levels of judgement accuracy of "de-" redundancy in numeral-classifier phrases and wrong orders relevant to nominal classifiers. Learners have a good command of the basic structure of numeral classifier phrases; but show errors under complex syntax conditions.(2) Different classifiers and classifier categories have different acquisition difficulty. This article analyzes the degree of difficulty of 35 frequently used nominal classifiers according to 10 levels, and lists the order of difficulty of classifier categories in grammatical classification and semantic classification.(3) The acquisition ability of German-speaking learners at elementary and intermediate levels is still at the foundation level. When faced with new items inconsistent with old knowledge, they have a tendency to generate errors. Their acquisition performance has similarities with that of English-speaking learners, but also presents unique characteristics related to linguistic background.(4) The acquisition of nominal classifiers has correlation with Chinese word frequency. Interlanguage use frequency of nominal classifiers has a high correlation with the frequency of Chinese classifiers. The acquisition level of fixed classifiers has a medium correlation with the frequency of Chinese nouns while the acquisition level of individual classifiers has a medium correlation with the frequency of Chinese classifiers. Factorial analysis showed that the acquisition of nominal classifiers has correlation with semantic factors, and mother tongue also has an impact on the acquisition of Chinese nominal classifiers. Interlanguage use frequency has correlation with the frequency of German partitive nouns, while the acquisition of nominal classifiers shows relevance to German counterparts. Other influential factors included learning strategies, teaching influence, duration, and learning environment.Based on these results, we suggest that learners adopt different learning strategies toward different types of classifiers and use certain learning methods to reduce errors and improve acquisition. We further recommend that teachers use different teaching methods toward different categories of classifiers and step-by-step teaching of grammar items relevant to nominal classifiers according to item difficulty and learning level.