The Asian Conference on Language Learning - June 10-12 2011, Osaka Japan

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CONFERENCE THEME: "Connecting Theory and Practice"

Call For Papers: The abstract submissions deadline is April 1, 2011

The Asian Conference on Language Learning 2011 will be held alongside the Asian Conference on Technology in the Classroom. Registrants for either conference will allow attendees the option of attending sessions in the other.

(Originally Posted on February 03, 2011 at 11:00 AM)

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Abstract 

Detecting the influence of L1 syntactic patterns on Japanese EFL learners’ Interlanguage grammar

Yamauchi, Uchida & Kojima

In this presentation, the authors discuss findings from their ongoing study (2010-2013, supported by the 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 corpora using data from their own classes.

During the 2010 fall semester, the authors set up several writing tasks for their classes using Moodle forums, which provided a secure environment within which students could experiment with online interactive English activities. The students’ forum posts were assembled into a learner corpus, for which purpose a tool is currently being developed to convert a Moodle xml file into a standard spreadsheet format.

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, as in the use of a be-verb in place of the Japanese topic marker wa; (b) omission of reference to known information, where no anaphora are normally used 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 different grammatical errors may be derived from a common feature of interlanguage grammar. A further elaborated short list of such interlanguage features will be developed for teachers to help learners to notice problems and to restructure their interlanguage grammars.

 

Presentation Slides

Click here to download:
20110612_osaka_ACLL_Yamauchi_Uchida_Kojima.pdf (1.94 MB)

 

Updated on June 13, 2011

M Yam

M Yam


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