Review of Classroom-Based Research on the Acquisition of Japanese Grammar

Abstract

A number of studies have been conducted on Japanese as a second or foreign language (JSL or JFL) pedagogy. (See the exhaustive list of studies in the past two decades on Shirai’s website at http://www.pitt.edu/~yshirai/jpn.html; also see the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL)’s website at https://www.ninjal.ac.jp/english/research/project/a/teachingandlearning/.) At NINJAL, more than 20 research projects have been carried out regarding the Japanese language. One area, called ‘Study on teaching and learning Japanese as a second language in a multicultural society’, covers research studies regarding JSL or JFL pedagogy, and five subgroups are studying Japanese based on individual themes. One topic area is ‘Research on the acquisition of Japanese as a second language in different learning environments’; this group aims to investigate how learners develop their knowledge from input and how it is used in communication. The group is also creating a database of learners’ utterances and written compositions to enable them to analyse variations according to the learning environment. In other words, they are aiming to build a large corpus to study learners’ language. Themes of the other four groups are: research on evaluation as an interactive act in society; research on the content of Japanese as a second language; research on basic vocabulary for learners of Japanese; and research on Japanese language and education for communication. None of these is related directly to second-language acquisition (SLA) research even though the title includes the word ‘acquisition’. Only a few studies focus on acquisition in grammar, particularly with regards to the role and effect of different types of instructional intervention to help specific grammatical features. There are almost no studies of JSL/JFL grammar acquisition in international journals, in contrast to the large number found in EFL and ESL acquisition literature.