Research projects

This research investigates how learners' L1 influences the ways in which they manage referential topics in oral Japanese narratives. It also examined how different tasks ("Here and Now"/ picture description task and "There and Then"/ film re-telling task) would shape oral narratives spoken by native and non-native speakers of Japanese. The study revealed that Korean learners of Japanese were able to use particles and zero anaphora appropriately throughout the narrative discourse at intermediate level, while their English speaking counterparts had difficulty. This was explained by the fact Korean language has equivalents to Japanese particles and zero anaphora, and the follow-up interviews supported this explication. The Korean learners, confirmed that they were making use of this typological 'closeness' between Japanese and Korean. The research also showed that the task types affect narrative discourse. The "There and Then" task elicited more grammatical structures and explicit expressions, as compared to the "Here and Now" task. While this trend was seen in both native and non- native speakers of Japanese, there were some differences as to how task types influence native and non-native speakers' narrative structures. A part of this research was presented at the international symposium held at Nagoya University in March, 2005, as well as the International Conference of Practical Linguistics of Japanese in March, 2006.