What Does a Novice Look Like? Describing the Grammar and Discourse of Young Learners of Japanese

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to describe diverse aspects of the speaking proficiency of novice-low to novice-mid level FLES students and to identify the syntactic knowledge presumably underlying such behavior. Data were collected from students who had been studying Japanese continually for six and seven years on a variety of oral production tasks. The analyses revealed a number of interesting findings with respect to syntactic development such as their control of certain particles and use of non-canonical word order. Additionally, although the FLES students comprehended input and spoke in ways similar to child native speakers in terms of certain word-level features, the quantity of their output differed with FLES students producing less output less often. The pedagogical implications of these findings for early language learning educators are discussed.