The causal relation between the Japanese language proficiency of 850 foreign learners and productive frequencies of lexical categories in expository text

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  • 外国人日本語学習者850名の日本語能力から説明文の品詞別産出頻度への因果関係
  • ガイコクジン ニホンゴ ガクシュウシャ 850メイ ノ ニホンゴ ノウリョク カラ セツメイブン ノ ヒンシ ベツ サンシュツ ヒンド エ ノ インガ カンケイ

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Abstract

With the widespread use of SNS (social networking services), people are communicating more frequently by written text than ever before. The ability to express content plainly is in great demand. In the present study, this is defined as “explanatory ability”. In contemporary society, this ability has become essential to daily life not only for native Japanese speakers but also for foreign learners of Japanese. Assuming the two story-writing tasks recorded in the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS) reflect explanatory ability, the productive frequencies of lexical categories found in the text written by 850 Japanese learners outside Japan were divided into two groups: (1) four categories of verbs, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and auxiliaries as “predicates” and (2) three categories of nouns, adjectives, and conjoined words as “noun phrases”. Using the statistical method of structural equation modelling (SEM), the five causal relation models linking Japanese proficiency as measured by the Japanese Computerized Adaptive Test (J-CAT) and text productive frequencies (see Figure 1) were examined to see how these models fit with data from proficiency scores and productive frequencies. Based on the fitting indexes, the study found the best causal model to be that identified in Model 2 (see Figure 2). This model showed causal sequencing in the following order: (1) procession of a basic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar (2) promotes reading and listening comprehension, further (3) enriches the production of predicates and (4) contributes to the production of noun phrases.

Journal

  • ことばの科学

    ことばの科学 34 45-64, 2020-12-25

    名古屋大学言語文化研究会

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