Acquisition of the Japanese Errand Construction in Japanese as a Foreign Language
Saori Nozaki · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2009
This study examined the acquisition of the Japanese errand construction by English-speaking Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners.The errand construction is an expression that describes a motion event in which a subject of motion goes elsewhere, does a certain activity, and comes back.The English errand constructions employ two verbs, 'go' and 'do (an activity),' or only one verb, 'do (an activity).'Japanese also takes two verbs to describe an errand motion event; however, the verbs that Japanese uses are different -'do (an activity) and come (back).' From my teaching experience in the Japanese program at The Ohio StateUniversity and the results of Inagaki's study (2001) that investigates the acquisition of motion verbs with goal prepositional/postpositional phrases by English-speaking Japanese as a foreign languages (JFL) learners, I supposed that difficulties are likely to be observed in the case of English-speaking JFL learner's acquisition of the Japanese errand construction.Although JFL learners are aware of the correct Japanese errand construction, such as Pen-o katte kimasu 'I will buy a pen and come (back),' they may wrongly accept Japanese sentences, such as Pen-o itte kaimasu 'I will go and buy a pen' and Pen-o kaimasu 'I will buy a pen,' as expressions of errand motion events due to an influence from English errand construction.I also wish to thank Dr. Mineharu Nakayama, who has also given me extensive intellectual support, especially on the experimental part of this thesis, since he kindly accepted to be on my thesis committee.His profound knowledge on experimental research helped me design the experiment and obtain the results of this thesis enormously.Moreover, in-depth discussions with him and his insights on the analysis of the data greatly impacted the outcome of the study.His patience and prompt feedback was also indispensable for the completion of this thesis.I would like to thank all the participants in this study -36 Japanese as a foreign language learners from the Japanese program at The Ohio State University and 9 Japanese native speaker participants.Despite their busy schedules in the middle of the vi spring quarter, all the participants willingly participated in this study.Without their cooperation, this thesis would not have been completed, either.