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Hard-to-learn conjunctive expressions for advanced learners: a survey on storytelling in I-JAS

  • Yuriko Sunakawa EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: April 1, 2022
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Abstract

There are basic grammatical items that are difficult to learn even for advanced learners, although they are introduced early at the beginning of their learning. Conjunctive expressions that imply speakers’ subjective feelings such as suruto ‘then,’ sokode ‘then and there’ are one such item. We use storytelling data from the “International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language” to investigate how Japanese native speakers and Japanese L2 learners whose first languages are Chinese and Korean use conjunctive expressions at the turning moments of a story. The results indicate that even learners at an advanced level do not use conjunctive expressions that native Japanese speakers do to make stories vivid and lively. We explain this phenomenon using the concept of “subjective construal.” We further consult previous research on Japanese teaching practices and consider how to instruct this type of expression.


Corresponding author: Yuriko Sunakawa, Professor Emeritus, University of Tsukuba, 414-5 Ichinokiba, Fujimi-machi, Maebashi-shi, Gunma-ken, Japan, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A), No. 16H01934 (2016–2020), and presented at the 11th International Conference on Practical Linguistics of Japanese (ICPLJ 11). I would like to thank Dr. Shinichiro Ishikawa for his constructive suggestions regarding data analysis. I am also grateful to Dr. Akiko Kurosawa and Dr. Andrej Bekeš for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript, and Dr. Jae-ho Lee for providing advice on grouping learners by J-CAT scores, and the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.

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Received: 2021-05-16
Accepted: 2021-10-28
Published Online: 2022-04-01
Published in Print: 2022-05-25

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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