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

Abstract

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.