Theory, Research and Pedagogy in Learning and Teaching Japanese Grammar

Theory, Research and Pedagogy in Learning and Teaching Japanese Grammar

Alessandro G. Benati Sayoko Yamashita Editors Theory, Research and Pedagogy in Learning and Teaching Japanese Grammar

Editors Professor Alessandro G. Benati Head of School of Languages and Area Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom Sayoko Yamashita Humanities and Social Sciences Jissen Women s University Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan ISBN 978-1-137-49891-5 DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49892-2 ISBN 978-1-137-49892-2 (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936729 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: Eye Ubiquitous / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Acknowledgements First, we would like to express our gratitude to the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for financially supporting our research project aimed at measuring the effectiveness of input manipulation pedagogical interventions on the acquisition of Japanese morphology and syntax. One of the outputs of this project is this edited volume. Special thanks to the contributors to this volume and to the reviewers who examined the content of the book. We are also grateful to Joseph Tabolt, Kentaro Kamimura and Benedetta Basile for organising a workshop at Waseda University in May 2014, and at the Daiwa Foundation in September 2014. A final thank you to Palgrave for accepting, supporting and producing this volume. v

Contents 1 Introduction 1 Alessandro G. Benati and Sayoko Yamashita Part I Theoretical Perspectives 5 2 Theoretical and Pedagogical Views on the Role of Grammar Instruction 7 Alessandro G. Benati and Benedetta Basile 3 Review of Classroom-Based Research on the Acquisition of Japanese Grammar 39 Sayoko Yamashita Part II Research and Pedagogical Applications 71 4 Processing Instruction and the Acquisition of Japanese Morphology and Syntax 73 Alessandro G. Benati vii

viii Contents 5 L2 Learners and the Apparent Problem of Morphology: Evidence from L2 Japanese 99 Megan Smith 6 The Role of Linguistic Explanation in the Acquisition of Japanese Imperfective -teiru 127 Yumiko Nishi and Yasuhiro Shirai 7 Grammar for Reading Japanese as a Second Language: Variation of Stance Expressions Using to omou in Different Written Registers 157 Noriko Iwasaki 8 An Integrated Grammar-Pragmatics Approach: Teaching Style Shifting in Japanese 187 Sayoko Yamashita and Noriko Ishihara Erratum to: An Integrated Grammar-Pragmatics Approach: Teaching Style Shifting in Japanese E1 Index 219

Notes on the Contributors Benedetta Basile is a Ph.D. student at the University of Greenwich, UK. The title of her research project is The relative effects of Processing Instruction and re- exposure on sentence and discourse-level interpretation and production: The case of the Japanese Past Simple. Professor Alessandro G. Benati is Professor of Second Language Acquisition and Head of School of Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He is internationally known for his research in second language learning and teaching, with special emphases on processing instruction. He has a strong publications record with 12 established monographs, chapters and articles in international journals (Language Awareness, IRAL, and Language Teaching Research). Noriko Ishihara is Professor of EFL/TESOL at Hosei University, Japan. Her research interests include instructional pragmatics, identity, and language teacher development. She is a co-author of Teaching and Learning Pragmatics: Where Language and Culture Meet (with Andrew D. Cohen, 2010/2014) and the editing author of its second edition in Japanese, 多文化理解の語学教育語用論的指導への招待 (2015). Noriko Iwasaki is Senior Lecturer in Language Pedagogy in the Department of Linguistics at SOAS, University of London, UK. She served as the Chair of the Association of Japanese Language Teachers in Europe, e.v. from 2011 to 2014 and currently serves as Deputy Chair. Her research interests include language pedagogy, second language acquisition and psycholinguistics. She has recently ix

x Notes on the Contributors co-authored, with Yuri Kumagai, The Routledge Intermediate to Advanced Japanese Reader: A Genre-based Approach to Reading as Social Practice (Routledge, 2015). She has also published articles in such journals as Applied Linguistics, Foreign Language Annals, Japanese Language and Literature, and Language and Cognitive Processes. Yumiko Nishi is Assistant Professor of Japanese Linguistics and Pedagogy at the University of Iowa, USA. Her primary research areas are verb semantics and the second language acquisition of aspect. She also investigates how the research findings can be applied to language pedagogy; in particular, the teaching of Japanese as a second/foreign language. Yasuhiro Shirai (Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, UCLA) is Professor of Applied Linguistics, Eirik Borve Professor in Modern Languages, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Case Western Reserve University, USA. His research interests include first and second language acquisition of grammatical constructions, in particular of tense-aspect morphology, and cognitive models of language acquisition and processing. He is co-editor of Studies in Language Sciences, an associate editor of First Language, and serves on several editorial boards, including Studies in Second Language Acquisition, IRAL, and Journal of Cognitive Science. Megan Smith is a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, USA. Megan is interested in the acquisition of second languages. Recent projects include investigating the acquisition of syntactic and discourse properties of null subjects in Turkish, and investigating whether beginning L2 Japanese learners are able to generalize the word order of declarative sentences to polar questions and embedded clauses. She is currently working on a project involving the acquisition of case morphology in L2 Japanese. Her dissertation investigates near-native Japanese speakers acquisition of Japanese morphosyntax and discourse knowledge. Sayoko Yamashita is Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Jissen Women s University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research interests include Language Pedagogy, SLA, Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Pragmatics, and Politeness. Her publications include Politeness in Classrooms: Comparison between JSL and EFL Classrooms (2014); Investigating interlanguage pragmatics ability: What are we testing?, in Investigating Pragmatics in Foreign Language Learning, Teaching and Testing (Multilingual Matters, 2008). She currently edits JALT JSL SIG Journal.

List of Figures Fig. 2.1 Example of traditional grammar instruction 12 Fig. 2.2 Example of a paradigm 13 Fig. 2.3 Example of input enhancement 16 Fig. 2.4 Structured-input task (referential) 21 Fig. 2.5 Structured-input task (affective) 22 Fig. 2.6 Consciousness-raising task 24 Fig. 2.7 Jigsaw task 26 Fig. 2.8 Structured-output task 28 Fig. 3.1 Distribution of teachers, by region (Japan Foundation 2013: 6) 42 Fig. 3.2 Distribution of learners, by region (Japan Foundation 2013: 6) 43 Fig. 4.1 Structured input activity 80 Fig. 4.2 Traditional instruction practice 81 Fig. 4.3 Structured input activity 88 Fig. 4.4 Traditional instruction practice 90 Fig. 6.1 Schematic representation of the four inherent lexical aspect classes (Li and Shirai 2000) 129 Fig. 7.1 Proportions of desu/masu, detached plain form and informal plain form 171 xi

List of Tables Table 3.1 Institutions, teachers, and learners, by region 44 Table 3.2 Comparison of Japanese SLA research environment and approaches used in Japan and the USA 45 Table 4.1 Means and standard deviation for interpretation task 83 Table 4.2 Means and standard deviation for production task 83 Table 4.3 Means and standard deviation for sentence-level interpretation task 93 Table 4.4 Means and standard deviation for sentence-level production task 93 Table 4.5 Means and standard deviation for discourse-level interpretation task 94 Table 4.6 Means and standard deviation for written discourse-level production task 95 Table 5.1 Mean comprehension question accuracy for reversible sentences 114 Table 5.2 Frequency counts and percentage accuracy for the supply of subject and object morphemes 116 Table 5.3 Summary of the logistic regression model 116 Table 6.1 Timing of the introduction of progressive and resultative -teiru in textbooks 134 Table 6.2 Summary of participants 139 Table 6.3 Three types of resultative sentences 141 Table 6.4 Summary of test items 141 xiii

xiv List of Tables Table 6.5 Summary of the form-focused instruction (written worksheet) 142 Table 6.6 The overall accuracy rates for Group 1 and Group 2 (pre-test) 144 Table 6.7 Accuracy rates of resultative items for Group 1 and Group 2 (pre-test) 145 Table 6.8 The average accuracy rates of resultative items for all participants (Group 1) 146 Table 6.9 The average accuracy rates of resultative items for the experimental group (Group 1) 146 Table 6.10 The average accuracy rates of resultative items for the control group (Group 1) 146 Table 6.11 Comparison of the gains for Group 1 147 Table 6.12 The average accuracy rates of resultative items for all participants (Group 2) 148 Table 6.13 The average accuracy rates of resultative items for the experimental group (Group 2) 148 Table 6.14 The average accuracy rates of resultative items for the control group (Group 2) 148 Table 6.15 Comparison of the gains for Group 2 149 Table 6.16 Summary of results 149 Table 6.17 Summary of the accuracy rates of resultative items (Group 2) 150 Table 7.1 Numbers of samples and words in each register 166 Table 7.2 Use of to omou in each register 168 Table 7.3 Sentence-ending styles: proportions of plain, desu/masu, and incomplete endings 170 Table 7.4 Frequency of the use of omowa-reru and omo-eru 172 Table 7.5 Modal expressions following omou 174 Table 7.6 The use of SFPs and the extended predicates following omou 175 Table 7.7 SFPs used at the end of omou predicates (1): conventional SFPs 175 Table 7.8 SFPs used at the end of omou predicates (2): less conventional SFPs 175

List of Tables xv Table 7.9 Use of modal expressions within the embedded clauses 177 Table 7.10 The use of SFPs and the extended predicates within to-clauses 178 Table 7.11 SFPs used within to-clauses (1): conventional SFPs 178 Table 7.12 SFPs used within to-clauses (2): sequences containing SFPs 178 Table 8.1 Activity 1 204