A Longitudinal Study of Japanese Students’ L2 Oral Grammar

Abstract

It is assumed that teachers’ educational lectures and materials are having some impact on students’ knowledge and skills. This longitudinal study examines the reality of how Japanese L2 university students’ accuracy in English changes over an academic year. In April / May 2018, 15 Japanese university students provided a self-introduction monologue followed by a three-question dialogue, which was repeated in early 2019. These L2 interactions by Japanese speakers formed the JUSFC2018 corpus and the JUSFC2019 corpora. This study examines the oral grammar of students’ monologues. Research questions related to whether or not there was a significant difference between in grammatical accuracy from the first interview session to the second year (regarding errors in clauses per 100 words, global errors and local errors, and in specific errors related to parts of speech) and what were the most frequently occurring errors in both corpora. Descriptive statistics showed that error-free clauses / 100 words and clauses with errors / 100 words doubled. Global errors showed a marginal decline, yet local errors increased by 27.3 percent. For errors related to parts of speech, a t-test confirmed there was a significant difference between the two speech corpora with more error frequency occurring in the 2019 corpus. The most common error reiteration involved incorrect phrasing, article omission, preposition omission, and errors related to plurals. In short, little improvement in oral grammatical accuracy was noted. This data highlights the difficulty in having students self-edit themselves and paying more attention to being more accurate with their speech.



Author Information
Robert Long, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
Hiroaki Watanabe, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan

Paper Information
Conference: ACLA2019
Stream: Education

This paper is part of the ACLA2019 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon