Organizer: Fumiko Asari Nazikian, Princeton University
Chair and Discussant: Seiichi Makino, Princeton University
Discourse analysis in linguistics is a method for the study of "language beyond boundaries of isolated sentences." As Kuno ( Kuno Susumu, Danwa no bunpo [Tokyo: Taishuukan 1978]) puts it, in order to sufficiently explain linguistic phenomena, we need to understand not only the syntactic rules underlying isolated sentences, but also the discoursal factors which control such phenomena. Although discourse analysis is a useful method to characterize a given language, it has not found much application in second or foreign language teaching.
Language teaching has traditionally placed more focus on sentence-based grammar analysis than discoursal and extralinguistic factors such as the type of information, the speaker's (the writer's) assumptions about the listener's (the reader's) state of mind or knowledge, and the way the speaker's (the writer's) communicative intent is understood. The teaching of a second or foreign language also tend to be strongly focused on accuracy of the grammatical acquisition and less so on pragmatic factors such as the speaker's (the writer's) assumptions about the reader's or the listener's knowledge.
In this panel, we go beyond the sentence-based analysis of students' learning problems and attempt to contribute to a better understanding of the learning process of students through the analysis of discourse comprehension. We also aim to shed light on linguistic phenomena such as "omission," "repetition," "foregrounding," "backgrounding" of information, "development of topics," "identifiability" of information, and so forth. The panel will discuss the implications of the research findings for improving the teaching of Japanese as a second language.
Learner's Difficulties in Listening Comprehension
Fumiko Asari Nazikian and Terumi Mizumoto, Princeton University
American students of Japanese language experience significant difficulties picking up the communicative intent of native speakers of Japanese. Although most second language students experience communicative difficulties, the problems of the American student of Japanese can be particularly difficult owing to significant cultural differences in the way information is delivered in discourse.
In this study, we present discourse-based analysis of listening comprehension of American students of Japanese. The analysis of the learners' difficulties has generally focused on sentence-based grammar analysis. However, to understand the speaker's intent in discourse, the analysis of individual sentences is insufficient. In discourse, the listener also needs to determine the communicative intent of the speaker through selectively filtering the flow of information. Here we refer to the three types of information as defined by Chafe (Chafe, Wallace, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time.[Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993]):
(1) information activated at the speech moment ("active")
(2) information activated before the speech moment and is retrievable ("semiactive")
(3) information not introduced at the speech moment ("new")
In particular we study the way in which native speakers of Japanese and English speakers "foreground" and "background" (Nazikian, Fumiko, Functional Approach to Japanese Conditionals, Tara, Ba, To,and Nara, unpublished dissertation, The University of Sydney, 1995) the informational content of the discourse. The speaker foregrounds or backgrounds the active, semiactive or new information in order to achieve the desired communicative intent. We aim that this analysis will contribute to a clearer understanding of the learning difficulties of students of Japanese.
Reading Comprehension and Predictive Skills
Mayumi Oka, Columbia University
Reading is often considered a receptive skill; however efficient reading also requires predictive ability. While processing on-going information, the reader must simultaneously remember old information and predict the following text.
Prediction is one of the most useful and important skills of reading as it contributes to the efficient processing of information and to a better comprehension of the text. However, American students of Japanese find it very difficult to predict the following discourse while reading Japanese texts, even when they do not have lexical or grammatical problems.
For example, students of Japanese experience difficulty when they fail to identify a referent denoted by demonstrative pronouns such as kore "this," are "that/it," sore "that," and so on. There are several factors which may explain this difficulty. One is that Japanese is a highly context-bound language where the reader has to identify a referent by a demonstrative from the context alone. Also, a demonstrative may refer both to a referent in the preceding context (= anaphoric) and to a referent in the following context (cataphoric), and it seems very difficult for the student to distinguish between the two.
In this study, I will investigate several factors which may explain why students fail to predict the correct context, placing special emphasis on the use of demonstratives in Japanese. Applying these findings, I will demonstrate pedagogical techniques which can be used to improve predictive skills of students, and therefore the overall process of reading.
Reading Comprehension and Omission
Satoru Ishikawa and Yoshiko Jo, Princeton University
Students of Japanese language face various difficulties in reading comprehension arising out of omission, inversion, relative clause, absence of demonstrative pronouns, differences in writing styles and lack of cultural knowledge.
However, the student of Japanese seems to experience the greatest difficulty dealing with omission both in reading and listening. Although omission is a characteristic of many languages, in Japanese it is particularly common. Kuno ( Kuno Susumu, Danwa no bunpoo [Tokyo: Taishuukan, 1978]) studied the mechanism of omission in Japanese, and found several rules of omission, some of which were shared by other languages. As a general principle, omission occurs when an element is "recoverable" from the linguistic or the extralinguistic context. As for the order of omission, older information tend to be omitted first. Kuno also pointed out that there are Japanese specific conditions under which omission occurs. In Japanese many words can be deleted as the language is strongly context-based. In particular, the omission of a topic (an element marked by the topic marker wa) occurs in Japanese under conditions which differ from English.
Focusing on differences in "recoverability" of information between Japanese and English, I aim to characterize the situations in which students experience most difficulty in omission. The results of the analysis can then be used in the classroom to specifically target these difficulties.
Cue-based Analysis on Acquisition of WA and GA by L2 Japanese Learners
Hideo Tomita, Kenyon College
The present study investigated the acquisition of Japanese WA and GA with learners of Japanese as a second language. Based on the notion of 'cue-based learning' in the Competition Model (MacWhinney, 1987; MacWhinney and Bates, 1989), linguistic environments for WA and GA were classified under the two types of cues, local cues and global cues, and an experiment was conducted. Several findings will be reported, including the following: (1) learners demonstrated early acquisition of WA as well as GA when those particles were under the environment of local cues; (2) learners tended to show early acquisition of WA compared with GA, but this is true only when WA was under the environment of local cues.
The Competition Model defines language acquisition as "problem of mapping function and form." The central concept of this model is cue-based learning, which assumes that various linguistic cues guide learners to map function and form, and that learning of those cues helps develop acquisition of language. The major hypothesis in our study originates in Kail (1989), which states that local cues require less amount of storage and cross-referencing for interpretation to occur than do topological cues (= global cues in our study), and the linguistic facts guided by local cues will be acquired early. The experiment supported this hypothesis. The current study will present the classification of linguistic environments for WA and GA by cue types, and argue, based on the findings, that the classification will contribute to a systematic study as well as teaching that involves WA and GA.
References
Kail, M. (l989). Cue validity, cue cost, and processing types in sentence comprehension in French and Spanish. In: B. MacWhinney and E. Bates (eds.). New York Academic Press.
MacWhinney, B. (1987). The Competition Model. In Brian MacWhinney (ed.), Mechanism of Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
MacWhinney, B. and Bates (eds.) (1989). The Crosslinguisitic Study of Sentence Processing. New York: Cambridge University Press.