A paper titled “Teaching ‘Yi+Classifier’ to Native Speakers of English and Korean in Intermediate Chinese Classes: Error Analysis and the Designing of a Pedagogical Decision Tree,” by Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures Tiao-Guan Huang, was recently published in the Taiwan Journal of Chinese as a Second Language.
Based on the research findings presented in the paper, Huang gave invited lectures at National Central University and National Taiwan University earlier this month.
Huang said the paper examines the common errors produced by native Korean and American English speakers who are in the process of learning to use yi ‘one’+classifier at the intermediate level of Mandarin Chinese.
She argues that “such errors tend to occur when learners are not trained to observe the discursive referentiality patterns of nominals, which determine when a noun should or can be modified by yi ‘one’+classifier.”
In her paper, Huang establishes a pedagogical sequence in the form of a decision tree to provide such training and tailors it to native speakers of American English and Korean in intermediate Chinese classes. She also makes suggestions for further research on pedagogy of numeral classifiers at a higher level.
