| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學研究所 === 98 === Chinese and Japanese both use numeral classifiers. The number and the function of Chinese classifiers are generally considered more complicated than Japanese counterparts. By contrastive analysis, it is believed that Japanese learners should have difficulties learning Chinese classifiers. This study discusses the use of Chinese classifiers among Japanese learners using contrastive analysis and hierarchies of difficulty (hereafter HD). Thirty six Chinese classifiers which are employed as the target materials in this study were selected on the basis of the sequentiality of Pedagogical Grammar. Employing the correspondences of orthography and semantics between Chinese and Japanese, this study classifies these corresponding relations into five categories: “identical relations in both orthography and semantics”, “relations that two languages share the same orthography and share semantics partially”, “relations that two languages differ in orthography but share identical semantics”, “relations that two languages differ in orthography but share semantics partially”, “absence in Japanese”. Uni-directional applied contrastive analysis is drawn on to predict the HDs of the classifier performance among Japanese learners.
The questionnaires constructed on the basis of the aforementioned classifier classifications are used to test three groups, who were recruited from Mandarin Training Center: one group for thirty novice-mid Japanese learners; one group for thirty intermediate Japanese learners; one group for twenty native Chinese speakers as a control group. The dependent variable for the analysis is the error rates learners made in the administered questionnaires. The results indicate that Japanese learners’ error rates can be attributed to the following potential sources: “transfer from native language”, “absence of classifiers in Japanese”, “overgeneralization of GE”, “misuse of the head of noun as classifiers.”
For the second line, the results indicate that no significance between the HDs and error rates among Japanese learners but that there is a reliable effect between teaching materials and error rates. The post-hoc analyses indicate that if Japanese learners have acquired the collocation usage between classifiers and nouns, their error rates were significantly reduced. By contrast, if they only have acquired the classifiers but not the collocations, no reliable reductions of error rates were found. In addition, the interviews with Japanese learners suggested that Japanese learners only learned by heart what the materials and the teacher taught but were unable to take advantage of the cognitive structure which can be transferred from their native language, Japanese. Suggestions are that teachers may draw on Cognitive learning theory and learners’ existent native knowledge on classifiers for instruction.
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