Investigation into Japanese learners' acquisition order of major grammatical morphemes using error-tagged learner corpus

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  • IZUMI EMI
    National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
  • UCHIMOTO KOYOTAKA
    National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
  • ISAHARA HITOSHI
    National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

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Other Title
  • エラータグ付き学習者コーパスを用いた日本人英語学習者の主要文法形態素の習得順序に関する分析

Abstract

In foreign language education, it is important for teachers to know their students'acquisition order of major linguistic items in the target language.There have been alot of studies done for revealing natural sequence in second language acquisition since1970's, and it is one of the established ideas that major grammatical morphemes areacquired in the common order by learners across different backgrounds such as theirL1, ages, or learning environments (The fist hypothesis).However, since 1980's, a contradictory hypothesis that the difference in learners'backgrounds can cause thedifference in their acquisition orders (The second hypothesis) has been introducedby several studies mainly on the acquisition order of Japanese learners of English.In these studies, they found that Japanese learners had a unique acquisition orderwhich is different from the natural sequence which supports the first hypothesis.Inthis paper, we tried to see which of these two contradictory hypotheses could be ap-plied in the error-tagged corpus of Japanese leaner English named “The NICT JLE (Japanese Learner English) Corpus”.In the experiment, we have found that thereis no significant correlation between the sequence which supports the first hypothe-sis and the sequence extracted from our corpus.On the other hand, there was thesignificant correlation between our sequence and the one which supports the secondhypothesis.The most distinguished difference between our sequence and the onewhich supports the first hypothesis is that articles and plural-s are acquired in thelater stage by Japanese learners.This might arise from L1 transfer because Japaneselanguage does not have any relevant markers with articles and plural-s.Therefore, we concluded that our result can support the second hypothesis.We assume thatthis analysis can be expanded by using information on learners'errors or proficiencylevels in the NICT JLE Corpus, to give us some important clues for improving thecurrent language teaching system.

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