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Native Language effect on confusion of similar lexical forms.

January 1992

In book: New Direction in Contrastive Linguistics (pp.199-209)
Publisher: Innsbrucker Beitraege zur Kulturwissenschaft
Editors: M. Marcus and Ch. Mair

Authors:

University of Haifa

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Productive English Vocabulary of Primary School Students Attending Two Bilingual Schools in Germany. The Influence of Language Background and Institutional Settings

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Rethinking language education in Taiwan: A case of English majors’ use of Chinese classifiers in translation

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Jan 2015

Bin-Bin Yu

This paper aims to bring attention to language education in Taiwan through a case study of English majors’ Chinese proficiency by way of their use of classifiers. Due to the increasing exposure to English learning environments in university, the Chinese proficiency of English learners might be influenced. This study is a first longitudinal investigation into English majors’ use of Chinese classifiers in translation. Chinese classifiers are words that occur in the form of a numeral followed by a classifier before a noun the classifier modifies. The lack of awareness of Chinese classifiers causes a variety of problems in English-Chinese translation. English-majored students under investigation were put to tests during their second and fourth years in university with elicitation materials designed by the researcher. Findings show a similar tendency towards the use of Chinese classifiers for the two tests, even misconceptions of some homophonic classifiers.

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