A Study Of English-speaking Learners' Acquisition Of Chinese Action-measure Words

One obvious difference between the Chinese vocabulary system and Indo-European vocabulary system is that the Chinese system uses measure words.Action-measure words make up a big part of Chinese measure words and are significantly important to foreign students in the process of learning Chinese measure words.Although the study of action-measure words has made some achievements in academic circles,when compared to the study of noun classifiers,the study of action-measure words is still in the preliminary period.Moreover,despite the fact that action-measure words has finished teaching in the intermediate stages of Chinese education,learners do not fully grasp the action-measure words that are regulated in the Outline of HSK Level Standards and Grammatical Level and textbooks and many learners in the intermediate and advanced stages still make mistakes when using themIn this paper,firstly,on the basis of summarizing the predecessors' research,the Chinese action-measure words are divided into special action-measure words and borrowed action-measure words,and borrowed action-measure words are divided into borrowing from nouns,borrowing from verbs,borrowing from the last morpheme of liheci and borrowing from verb reduplication according to He Jie's classification standard in Studies of Modern Chinese Quantifiers.Then on the basis of Chen Yun'summary of Chinese action-measure words arrangement in Chinese Textbook,Boya Chinese,Ladder Chinese and the other 12 kinds of textbooks,combined with the comprehensive consideration of the new HSK vocabulary outline,the Outline of HSK Level Standards and Grammatical Level and Oxford University's centre for Chinese language teaching classification of quantifiers,we determined the specific contents of supervision,including nine special action-measure words and sixteen borrowed action-measure words.In this paper,we selected 60 Chinese learners from Institute for International Students Nanjing University as subjects and investigated the total number of action-measure words,the acquisition order of action-measure words and subjective judgment of action-measure words' difficulty in the form of questionnaires.In addition,we analyzed the usage and accuracy of action-measure words according to Foreign Students Chinese Inter-language Corpus of College of Chinese Language and Culture Jinan University and HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus of Beijing language and Culture University.After analyzing the data of questionnaires and corpora,we found that:(1)In general,English-speaking learners' acquisition levels of action-measure words are positively correlated with their own Chinese level.The accuracy of action-measure word will increase with the learner's Chinese level.However,the acquisitions of a few action-measure words were the same among intermediate and advanced learners.(2)Advanced level learners learned better than primary and intermediate level learners about grammatical function and semantic collocation of action-measure words.Also,advanced level learners were better than primary and intermediate level learners in terms of recognizing wrong choices in the questionnaires.(3)The learners' acquisition of different kinds of action-measure words do exist differences.Learners' acquisition of borrowing from verb reduplication was very good,while the acquisition of special action-measure words were good.Besides,the acquisition of borrowing from the last morpheme of liheci,borrowing from nouns and borrowing from verbs were very complicated.(4)Learners had certain judgment and cognition on the difficulty of action-measure words,but learners had made misjudgment on its difficulty.For most questions,although learners subjectively thought they were hard,the accuracy of questions was not low.(5)The error rates of different kinds of action-measure words were all lower than the learners' subjective judgment of difficulty.That is to say,learners have been overestimated about different kinds of action-measure words'judgment of difficulty.While the error rate of borrowing from verbs was the most close to the learners' subjective judgment of difficulty,the error rate of borrowing from verb reduplication was the most different from the learners' subjective judgment of difficulty.According to the analysis of the questionnaires,we believe that English-speaking learners tend to affected by the following three factors:the overall Chinese level of learners,different kinds of action-measure words' different difficulties and the similarities and differences of momentum expressions between Chinese and English.Therefore,we may suggest that teachers should select different emphasis of action-measure words to teach according to different levels of learners.Also,teachers should teach step by step and design different teaching content for students according to different difficulties of special action-measure words and borrowed action-measure words.Finally,teachers should compare and eplain similar momentum expressions among Chinese and English,as well as momentum expressions that are not in English but in Chinese.