Production of wh-questions by Japanese EFL learners: Preliminary classroom data collection

Abstract

Morishita, Miwa and Yasunari Harada. 2015. Production of wh-questions by Japanese EFL learners: preliminary classroom data collection. Linguistic Research 32 (Special Edition), 1-13. High School Course of Study for English set forth by the Japanese Ministry of Education started emphasizing communication and communicative approach around the year 1990.​ In recent years, acquisition of communicative competence has become the most important objective of English language education in Japan as globalization affects diverse aspects of governmental and enterprise sectors of the Japanese society. On the other hand, while asking the right questions at the right time is an integral part of effective oral interactions, Japanese EFL learners experience processing and other difficulties in doing so. First, in classroom situations, students are generally discouraged from asking the teacher, and each other, any direct questions. Second, this leads to a general lack of communicative intelligence among those students in coming up with interesting things to ask. Third, producing English question sentences on the fly poses non-negligible processing difficulties for Japanese EFL learners. In Japanese, question sentences are formed simply by adding the question marker “ka” at the end of a sentence without changing the word order. In contrast,