Second Language Acquisition Studies Observed in “The International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language” (I-JAS) by Chinese Speakers: From the Perspectives of Pragmatic Transfer

Abstract

This study examines the pragmatic transfer from L1 Chinese to L2 Japanese based on the learners’ corpus. The research addresses the following two research questions: (1) What are the specific tendencies among native Chinese learners of Japanese in “request” expressions, compared with French, Spanish, and English learners? (2) Do Chinese speakers have specific tendencies to be affected by their native language? We analyzed the role play data of learners of Japanese whose native languages are Spanish, French, English, and Chinese. We discovered that “suspended clauses (incomplete sentences)”, such as “I have a favor to ask you, but …” which are frequently used by Japanese native speakers, are rarely used by the learners of Japanese: Spanish, French, English, and Chinese. However, native Chinese learners use the confirmation expressions more often, such as “is it OK?” at the end of the sentence than other language speakers, which native Japanese hardly use. We then examined pairs of Chinese native speakers by having them work on the same tasks in Chinese. We found they use the confirmation expressions often in Chinese to show politeness. Here are the results of this study: (1) the learners rarely used the “suspended clauses”, however, it was not specific to Chinese speakers; and (2) “the confirmation expressions” was observed more frequently among Chinese speakers compared with the other speakers, and it can be considered a negative transfer from learners’ native language, Chinese.