Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities
- The main goal: to provide an opportunity for academicians and professionals from various arts and humanities related fields from all over the world to come together and learn from each other.
- An additional goal: to provide a place for academicians and professionals with cross-disciplinary interests related to arts and humanities to meet and interact with members inside and outside their own particular disciplines.
I'm presenting at this conference with my co-researcher: “DETECTING JAPANESE SYNTACTIC TRAITS IN LOWER-LEVEL LEARNERS' WRITTEN ENGLISH PRODUCTION” (Uchida & Yamauchi 2011).
Abstract:
Grammatical transfer has long been considered one of the major factors behind errors in learners’ interlanguages. In most cases discussed in the literature, however, the learners in question are at upper intermediate or advanced levels and the analyses tend to be focused on the differences between their production and that of native speakers. In the context of teaching English at middle-level colleges and universities in Japan, where the average proficiency level of students is considerably lower, a different approach to grammatical errors may be more appropriate.
So far in our project, pilot studies have suggested that learners at lower levels of proficiency predominantly rely on the grammar of their native language (i.e., Japanese), rather than only occasionally having recourse to it. In this presentation, we will show how particular types of ungrammatical structures repeatedly occur in such students’ written production, as a result of direct misapplication of Japanese syntactic rules. These include thematization, omission of reference to known information, and free word order, which are all characteristic of Japanese syntax.
As a preliminary to describing and explaining these error patterns in a more precise way, we are collecting more samples of learner language, through the use of Moodle modules such as “forums” and “assignments”. How we are organizing these activities and collecting data will be described.
