The idea for this edited book arose from a joint research project between the University of Greenwich in the UK and Jissen Women’s University in Japan. The project, for which a Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation grant was secured, was entitled ‘Grammar Acquisition and Grammar Teaching in Japanese’. It had three main objectives:
- To secure a scholarship for a Ph.D. student to conduct empirical research to measure the acquisition of specific Japanese grammatical and syntactical features;
- To secure a publishing contract for a book on Japanese learning and teaching of grammar; and
- To run a number of workshops for Japanese teachers in Japan and the UK.
Theory, Research and Pedagogy in Learning and Teaching Japanese Grammar is the title chosen for the book as one of the outcomes of the project. The title was chosen to give an opportunity to students, teachers and scholars in the field of Japanese language to present and discuss research concerned with grammar learning and teaching. This research was conducted to measure how, what and why certain pedagogical intervention to grammar instruction might be more effective than others. Chapters selected for this volume have explored this topic from both a theoretical and a pedagogical perspective. Within this framework, these chapters have addressed various issues concerning the learning and teaching of Japanese grammar, which for the purpose of this volume have been amalgamated into two main areas:
- Theoretical perspectives and
- Research and pedagogical applications.
The first two chapters in the volume are concerned with issues related to the theory and overall research findings on the role of grammar instruction in Japanese.
Chapter 2 explores contemporary theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on the role of grammar instruction. Benati seeks to evaluate the two main views on the role of instruction: (i) makes no difference; and (ii) it might be beneficial. If instruction is beneficial, what needs to be considered is what type of pedagogical intervention is the most effective. Traditional instruction is largely mechanical and does not make a difference to the acquisition of a grammatical system. What is needed is a new pedagogical intervention that takes into consideration how learners internalise the grammatical properties of a target language and facilitates these internal processes. The chapter focuses on input-based and output-based pedagogical intervention providing examples for Japanese language teaching.
Chapter 3 provides a ‘state of the art’ examination of the research carried out to investigate Japanese as a second or foreign language, both in Japan and overseas. First, Yamashita gives an overview of the historical and current situation regarding the way that Japanese language research is conducted, and introduces the current position of the research. She then selected five articles to review, to observe the roles of different types of instructional interventions (input-based, interaction-based, output-based pedagogical options, and processing instruction) in the acquisition of Japanese grammar. Two articles were originally written in Japanese and published in an second-language acquisition (SLA)-related journal based in Japan, focusing on negative feedback, input and output-based instructions using a theory of Focus on Form. In the same journal, another article, written in English, discussed differences among input-practice, output-practice and traditional mechanical practice was also reviewed. Two other articles also written in English focused on processing instruction and appeared as chapters in books published overseas. Grammatical items regarded as difficult for learners to master, including conditionals, verbs of giving and receiving, the conjunction de, the past tense and passive forms, were investigated in those studies. There was also a discussion regarding the lexical preference principle and the sentence location principle.
Chapter 4 reports on an investigation comparing the effects of processing instruction and traditional instruction on the acquisition of Japanese past tense forms and passive constructions. While research studies on the effects of processing instruction have been carried out with different languages and different linguistics features, very little research has been conducted focusing on measuring the effects of this pedagogical intervention on the acquisition of Japanese. The main findings from these studies reveal that processing instruction is an effective pedagogical intervention in altering interpretation strategies for processing verbal morphology and syntax. Benati concludes that processing instruction is effective at helping learners to process grammar in Japanese.
Chapter 5 presents the results of a study investigating the acquisition of case morphology in Japanese. The main findings from Smith’s study suggest that L1 (native language) English learners of L2 (second language) Japanese are able to interpret accurately ambiguously case-marked sentences, and are able to produce accurate case-marked sentences.
Chapter 6 investigates the role of explicit grammar instruction on the learning of the resultative meaning of -teiru by teaching learners of Japanese the notion of lexical aspect, and how aspectual meaning of -teiru is determined by lexical aspect. Nishi and Shirai suggested from the results that form-focused instruction that concentrates on the learning of verb semantics seems to have a positive effect on the learning of the resultative meaning of -teiru for beginning-level learners.
Chapter 7 discussed reading activities and the role of grammar. Iwasaki points out that there is an underlying misconception that similar grammar is used in both spoken and written language, which is not the case in reality. Using a small-scale corpus-based study, she focused on a writer’s expression ‘to omou’ (think that) and showed the writer’s grammatical choices in expressing the stance. Her study findings help L2 learners to consider the role of grammar in reading, and learn the writer’s identity, persona and attitude.
Chapter 8 argues for the integration of pragmatics with grammar teaching. Yamashita and Ishihara take as an example ‘style shifting’ between the sentence- or clause-final desu/masu and plain forms, and attempt to show that it is important for learners to understand not only ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ but also ‘use’ to fully understand grammar. They reviewed research studies regarding the desu/masu style-shifting extensively and proposed a series of classroom activities for teaching style-shifting using pragmatic knowledge.