Asia TEFL 2011 - The influence of L1 syntactic patterns on Japanese EFL learners’ interlanguage grammar
Call for Presentations
- Theme: Teaching English in a Changing Asia : Challenges and Directions
- Dates: July 27-29, 2011
- Venue: Hotel Seoul KyoYuk MunHwa HoeKwan, Seoul, Korea
Subtopics
- Approaches and Methodologies
- Curriculum
- Distance Education
- Education / Language Policy
- International / Intercultural Communication
- Second Language Acquisition
- Materials Writing and Design
- Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles
- Teacher Education
- Teaching Young Learners
- Testing, Assessment, and Evaluation
- The Use of IT in Language Teaching
- Using Local Literatures in English or Translations for Teaching English
The abstract must not exceed 250 words, while the bio-data must not exceed 60 words.
Deadline for Proposal Submission: February 10, 2011
(January 03, 2011 at 7:00 PM)
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Proposal Abstract (Yamauchi & Uchida)
The influence of L1 syntactic patterns on Japanese EFL learners’ interlanguage grammar
The influence of L1 syntactic patterns on Japanese EFL learners’ Interlanguage grammar This presentation is a part of our 4-year research study (2010-2013, supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research: 22520573) that aims to (i) identify and describe major features of Japanese EFL learners’ interlanguage grammar at an earlier stage in development, focusing primarily on errors possibly influenced by the L1 syntax, and (ii) develop a practicable way for language teachers to progressively build learner corpus using data from their own classes.
During the 2010 fall semester, the authors set up several writing tasks for their classes using Moodle, and the students performed the tasks online outside of the classroom. The focus of this presentation is on common errors that have been identified so far in the students’ writing that strongly suggest the influence of Japanese syntactic patterns, including: (a) mapping a topic-comment construction in Japanese to a subject-predicate construction, which is likely to be linked to the use of a be-verb like Japanese topic marker wa; (b) omission of refernce to known information, where zero anaphora is expected in Japanese; and (c) confusion of predicate-argument relations, especially with psychological predicates.
The observation and analysis of the initial set of learners’ writing data suggest that seemingly diffferent grammatical errors may be derived from a common feature of interlanguage grammar. A further elaborated short list of such interlangauge features will help the teacher to effectively promote learners’ noticing of their problems and restructuring their interlanguage grammars.
