Applying cognitive linguistics to teaching Chinese classifiers: Evidence from teaching Chinese as a heritage language in Germany

When teaching Mandarin Chinese classifiers, teachers usually ask students to memorize 'classifier + noun', phrases as collocations. Given that Mandarin Chinese has a vast and complicated system of classifiers, the rote memorization of 'classifier + noun' collocations is challenging and monotonous. Therefore, the present study aims to improve that pedagogical method by applying cognitive linguistics. Previous studies did not explicitly demonstrate the cognitive approach to teaching Chinese classifiers, resulting in difficulty in practice. Thus, this study presents a step-by-step introduction to teaching Chinese classifiers with cognitive linguistics. Afterwards, an experiment is presented with children learning Chinese as a heritage language in Germany in order to test the efficiency of the cognitive approach and the traditional method (rote memorization of 'classifier + noun', collocations). Results suggest that the cognitive approach facilitated the learning of Chinese classifiers to a great extent. However, due to some limitations of the experiment, the cognitive approach did not outperform the traditional method. Even so, the present study concludes that the cognitive approach is worthwhile and promising for future teaching activities for two reasons. On the one hand, the cognitive approach helped students and was not worse than the traditional approach in this study. On the other hand, previous studies indicate many potentials of the cognitive approach. Finally, several suggestions learned from the limitations of this study are provided for further research.