Handbook of Japanese Applied Linguistics

Masahiko Minami

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781501500800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Applied linguistics is the best single label to represent a wide range of contemporary research at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, to name a few. The Handbook of Japanese Applied Linguistics reflects crosscurrents in applied linguistics, an ever-developing branch/discipline of linguistics. The book is divided into seven sections, where each chapter discusses in depth the importance of particular topics, presenting not only new findings in Japanese, but also practical implications for other languages. Section 1 examines first language acquisition/development, whereas Section 2 covers issues related to second language acquisition/development and bilingualism/multilingualism. Section 3 presents problems associated with the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Section 4 undertakes questions in corpus/computational linguistics. Section 5 deals with clinical linguistics, and Section 6 takes up concerns in the area of translation/interpretation. Finally, Section 7 discusses Japanese sign language. Covering a wide range of current issues in an in an in-depth, comprehensive manner, the book will be useful for researchers as well as graduate students who are interested in Japanese linguistics in general, and applied linguistics in particular.

Chapter titles

Chapter 1. Cognitive Bases and Caregivers' Speech in Early Language Development (Tamiko Ogura, Tezukayama University)
Chapter 2. Literacy Acquisition in Japanese Children (Etsuko Haryu, University of Tokyo)
Chapter 3. Age Factors in Language Acquisition (Yuko Goto Butler, University of Pennsylvania)
Chapter 4. Cross-lingual Transfer from L1 to L2 Among School-age Children (Kazuko Nakajima, University of Toronto)
Chapter 5. Errors and Learning Strategies by Learners of Japanese as an L2 (Kumiko Sakoda, Hiroshima University/NINJAL)
Chapter 6. Adult JFL Learners' Acquisition of Speech Style Shift (Haruko Minegishi Cook, University of Hawai'i at Manoa)
Chapter 7. Japanese Language Proficiency Assessment (Noriko Kobayashi, Tsukuba University)
Chapter 8. The Role of Instruction in Acquiring Japanese as a Second Language (Kaoru Koyanagi, Sophia University)
Chapter 9. The Influence of Topic Choice on Narrative Proficiency by Learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language (Masahiko Minami, San Francisco State University)
Chapter 10. CHILDES for Japanese: Corpora, Programs, and Perspectives (Susanne Miyata, Aichi Shukutoku University)
Chapter 11. KY Corpus (Jae-Ho Lee, Tsukuba University)
Chapter 12. Corpus-based Second Language Acquisition Research (Hiromi Ozeki, Reitaku University)
Chapter 13. Assessment of Language Development in Children with Hearing Impairment and Language Disorders (Kiyoshi Otomo, Tokyo Gakugei University)
Chapter 14. Speech and Language Acquisition in Japanese Children with Down Syndrome (Toru Watamaki, Nagasaki University)
Chapter 15. Revisiting Autistic Language: Is "literalness" a Truth or Myth? Manabu Oi (Osaka University/Kanazawa University)
Chapter 16. Towards a Robust, Genre-based Translation Model and its Application (Judy Noguchi, Mukogawa Women's University; Atsuko Misaki, Kwansei Gakuin University; Shoji Miyanaga, Ritsumeikan University; Masako Terui, Kinki University)
Chapter 17. Japanese Sign Language: An Introduction (Daisuke Hara, Toyota Technological Institute)
Chapter 18. Japanese Sign Language Phonology and Morphology (Daisuke Hara, Toyota Technological Institute)
Chapter 19. Japanese Sign Language Syntax (Noriko Imazato, Kobe City College of Technology)
Chapter 20. Sign Language Development and Language Input (Takashi Torigoe, Hyogo University of Teacher Education)

IIIThe teaching and learning of foreign languages

Kumiko Sakoda

5 Errors and learning strategies by learners of Japanese as a second language

1 Introduction

The purposes of this chapter include: (1) discussing learners’ errors and (2) claiming that making errors is a learning strategy used by language learners. Analyzing learners’ errors and correct usages helps us understand how their language systems and their rules operate and how they differ from the ones that teachers teach and from those of native speakers. In the 1960s and 1970s, error analysis, which attempted to classify the errors made by learners, flourished as a result of the criticism of contrastive analysis, which focused on the systematic comparison of a pair of languages for the purpose of identifying their structural differences and similarities. However, error analysis was also problematic for some reasons, and its heyday is long gone. However, it is obvious that no one can acquire a target language without making errors; even good language learners commit errors. Likewise, even the best teachers and the best method (if it exists) cannot go without learners producing errors.

Errors hold significant meaning for researchers and teachers. Error analysis in the 1960s and 1970s was problematic because of its methodological problems and scope limitations. This chapter affirms the correctness of the view that the learners’ errors are worthy of study in their own right, not just as a degenerate form of the target system, by presenting two empirical acquisition studies of Japanese as a second language (L2). One is a study on acquisition of the demonstratives KO-, SO- and A-, whereas the other concerns the particles NI and DE. Analysis of three years of longitudinal spoken data revealed interlanguage, a dynamic linguistic system developed by an L2 learner who is approaching the target language but has not become fully proficient. Learners are developing their own language systems, including errors, and one of the characteristics is that they make chunks and their chunking reflects their own rules and systematicity, which represent learning strategies.

To begin with, ‘errors’ and ‘learning strategies’ need to be defined. According to Corder (1967), an ‘error’ is a deviation in learner language which results from lack of knowledge of the correct rule (Ellis 2008). Lennon’s (1991) definition holds an error to be a linguistic form or combination of forms that, in the same context and under similar conditions of production, would, in all likelihood, not be produced by the speaker’s native speaker counterparts. James (1998) defines an error as an instance of language that is unintentionally deviant and is not self-corrigible by its author. This chapter tentatively adopts James’ definition. However, to define the term ‘errors’ is quite problematic, which we will discuss later.

The notion of “learning strategies” differs among researchers. Oxford (1990) and O’Malley and Chamot (1990), for example, classified learning strategies into some groups, such as cognitive, meta-cognitive, social, memory-related, compensatory and affective strategies. According to Selinker (1972), fossilization, which refers to the loss of progress in L2 acquisition despite regular exposure to and interaction with the target language, is caused by five central processes, and a learning strategy is one of them. Selinker describes a strategy of L2 learning as a tendency on the part of learners to reduce the target language to a simpler system. Also, Ellis (2008: 970) states, “A learning strategy is a device or procedure used by learners to develop their interlanguage. Learning strategies account for how learners acquire and automatize L2 knowledge.” We adopt Ellis’s definition in this chapter.

The chapter is organized as follows: Section 2 illustrates a historical overview of error analysis both in English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) and Japanese as a Second/Foreign Language (JSL/JFL) studies. Section 3 discusses problems of error analysis by focusing on the definition of error analysis, the limitation of scope, and methodological and theoretical problems. Section 4 introduces two acquisition studies of JSL: a study of Japanese demonstratives KO-, SO- and A- and a study of Japanese particles NI and DE. Analyzing learners’ errors and correct use investigates learners’ developing Japanese language systems. Section 5 concludes the chapter and suggests tha errors should not be regarded as signs of inhibition, but simply as an evidence of the learner’s strategies of learning, followed by a look at future directions in SLA research.

2 Overview of Error Analysis

This section illustrates an overview of error analysis in ESL/EFL and JSL/JFL studies. The section introduces some of the main findings of the studies.

2.1 Error analysis in ESL/EFL research: Historical trends

In the 1950s the audio-lingual approach to foreign language education was prevalent. In the heyday of the audio-lingual approach, it was thought that learning would be more difficult if the differences between the native and target language were great whereas it would be easier if the differences were small. These assumptions were based on the idea of contrastive analysis, which involves analyzing two languages for the purpose of observing where two languages differ and then using those differences as the basis for predicting errors and for developing foreign-language teaching curriculum. In other words, contrastive analysis, which shares its ideas with the behaviorist approach represented by Skinner (1957), is grounded on the assumption that language is a set of habits: (1) the habits established in one’s first language (L1) might help or facilitate second-language (L2) learning (i.e., positive transfer); but (2) they might interfere with L2 learning (i.e., negative transfer) and produce errors. However, the results from contrastive analysis were not always as had been expected. Instead, shared errors among learners of different first languages were found to be common.

By the early 1960s, Chomsky’s (1957, 1959, 1965) formulation of an innate rulegoverned system evolving toward the full adult grammar was received with enthusiasm by linguists and psychologists, and eventually by SLA researchers and foreignlanguage educators in the early 1970s. In the field of L1 acquisition, to begin with, Brown and Bellugi (1964) stressed the rule-governed nature of language acquisition as opposed to behaviorist theory, which holds that children’s speech is not rulegoverned but is shaped by external contingencies and reinforced by caretakers’ approval. While acknowledging the significant influence of environmental or parental interactions (e.g., mothers modify their speech to their children by simplifying, repeating, and paraphrasing), Brown and Bellugi emphasized that the process of language acquisition could not be explained by the behaviorist stimulus-response-reinforcement system alone. Rather, these researchers believed that the child’s ability to engage in inductive processing would aid language acquisition. They paid particular attention to inductive processes characterizing the child’s acquisition of syntactic structures. In analyzing toddlers’ language acquisition, Brown and Bellugi thus concluded that mother-child interaction, which is a cycle of imitations, reductions, and expansions, would help the child’s inductive processing of the latent structure and rules of the target language. In other words, Brown and Bellugi suggest that the child’s innate ability to formulate hypotheses about the rules underlying language might overshadow the importance of environmental factors. In this formulation, therefore, because language acquisition/learning is a developmental process that involves reorganization of knowledge, errors are considered a sign of progress (Davis, Ovando, and Minami 2013; Minami 2002, 2015; Minami and Ovando 2003).¹⁶

The impact of the above-described L1 research on L2 research was immense. Researchers turned their attention to errors and collected learners’ errors (Dulay and Burt 1972). Following Brown’s (1973) L1 acquisition study, which reported remarkable similarity among his three subject children in the order in which fourteen functor/ grammatical morphemes (e.g., present progressive -ing, plural –s) were acquired, Dulay and Burt (1974) conducted a series of L2 studies to examine the question of whether developmental sequences, regardless of the L1 or the L2, could be identified in terms of a common/invariant sequence of acquisition for functor morphemes in English. Replacing contrastive analysis, error analysis thus enjoyed considerable popularity in the late 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, many studies were conducted using error analysis (e.g., Corder 1967, 1971, 1981; Chamot 1978; Richards 1974).

Error analysis emphasized the importance of understandin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction to the Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics
• Table of contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Japanese applied linguistics and this volume
• I First language (L1) acquisition/development
• II Second language (L2) acquisition/development and bilingualism/multilingualism
• III The teaching and learning of foreign languages
• IV Corpus linguistics
• V Clinical linguistics
• VI Translation
• VII Sign languages
• Subject index
• Endnotes