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Article published In: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 48:2 (2025) ► pp.476–502

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Number marking in L2 English of the speakers of two classifier languages

A learner corpus study

 | The University of Queensland
ORCiD logo with link | The University of Sydney
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with the University of Sydney.

Published online: 18 March 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.24006.yao
Abstract
This paper explores the number marking challenges faced by L2 learners of English whose L1 is one of the classifier languages Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Chinese) or Bahasa Indonesia (henceforth Indonesian). It examines whether these groups differ in their marking of English number, and how the speaker’s level of proficiency, as well as linguistic factors including countability, concreteness, and determiner use, interact and influence their performance. The present study differs from previous studies in that it offers unique insights from authentic spoken data. The authors extracted 4000 tokens from the Chinese and Indonesian spoken monolog components in the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), involving 150 Chinese-speaking and 100 Indonesian-speaking learners across beginner and intermediate proficiency; the tokens were part-of-speech tagged and annotated. Although the analysis, using mixed-effects binomial logistic regression, revealed no performance differences between the groups and no significant proficiency effects, the study found a strong relationship between ungrammatical number marking and count nouns, particularly abstract count nouns (e.g., taking part-time job), as well as the absence of determiners (e.g., smoking in restaurant). These findings confirm that learners from classifier languages face significant challenges with count nouns and that inaccurate number marking often occurs where nouns appear unmarked for number in their L1. The paper concludes with pedagogical suggestions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature Review
    • 2.1Usage-based accounts of L2 number marking learning
    • 2.2Number marking across English, Chinese, and Indonesian
    • 2.3Countability, concreteness, determiners, and proficiency
  • 3.The present study
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data collection and processing
    • 4.2Statistical methods: Regression modelling
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Descriptive statistics of learners’ correct suppliance of number marking
    • 5.2Descriptive statistics of learners’ erroneous marking of number
    • 5.3Regression analysis results
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Answering the RQs
    • 6.2Pedagogical suggestions
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Declaration of contributions from Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process
  • Notes
  • References
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