2019, Vol., No.60

The Japanese Language Association of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.0

pISSN : 1229-7275
https://journal.kci.go.kr/jlak

This study investigated the acquisition of Japanese noun-modifying clauses by Korean-Japanese bilingual children who attended Korean elementary school. The acquisition of noun-modifying clauses as a heritage language was analyzed by comparing with the data of L1 children and adult learners of Japanese (L2 learners) in order to clarify the characteristics of Japanese as a heritage language. The oral interview data from 62 speakers of Japanese was utilized and analyzed in terms of their ages and proficiency levels. It is investigated whether center-embedded clauses are difficult to be produced. While L2 learners show a tendency that center-embedded clauses are not used at all at the lowest proficiency of Japanese, no such tendency is observed in a heritage language. However, it is indicated that for Korean-Japanese bilingual children, proficiency levels have an influence on the acquisition of center-embedded clauses. Second, I examine what kind of modified nouns are used, focusing on their animacy. Korean-Japanese bilingual children use animate nouns more than L1 children do, and show the same tendency as L1 and adult Japanese speakers do. However, the use of animate nouns increases as the children advance to higher levels of Japanese, which shows that proficiency of Japanese has an influence on the acquisition of animate nouns. In addition, the use of modified nouns such asもの・ところ is analyzed. The result shows that children of lowest grades and lowest proficiency of Japanese have a tendency to use modified nouns such asもの・ところ.

I have served OPI as a tester for the past 7 years and always had the following two questions every time when I conducted it: that is, (1) Is there a strong relationship between the level of the JLPT vocabulary used by examinees and the level of OPI?; and (2) Can the gap of examinees’ vocabulary levels be a main factor for the separation between Advanced Level and Intermediate Level in OPI? This paper observed utterances of 10 OPI examinees, and investigated the level of vocabulary in terms of JLPT (i.e. N1, N2/N3, N4, and N5 level) as well as frequencies of vocabulary for each level. As a result, (1) OPI Advanced learners appeared to use N1-level words more than 2% overall. Therefore their data had around 1700-1800 words overall. There was a gap between N2/N3-level vocabulary and N4-level vocabulary. Further, for both OPI Advanced and Intermediate levels, N5-level vocabulary occupied around 70% overall. Statistics analysis (Estimation of population variance) showed its general feature of occupancy in N5-level vocabulary. Lastly, the underlying principal was confirmed as such that OPI ratings relied on the appropriate usage of words, and not on the presence of words themselves.

The purpose of this study is to examine (1) Japanese major students’ specific reasons for choosing the Japanese language as their major and (2) learning styles that were preferred by learners majoring in the language, and investigate Japanese major students’ needs, whereby promote the qualitative enhancement of Japanese language education. It conducted a survey that incorporated a four-stage criterion for the students’ reasons for choosing this major (40 questions, Cronbach’s α: 0.944)and preferred learning styles (30 questions, Cronbach’s α: 0.753) on 45 first and second year students majoring in the Japanese language at Hanbat National University, which is a four-year national university. The completed surveys were then divided into “Atehamaranai (あてはまらない)” and “Atehamaru (あてはまる)” according to responses, and analyzed by using a chi-squared test in order to observe differences between the two responses in distribution. According to the results, the reasons for the students’ selection of the Japanese language as their major included interest in Japanese and Japan and interest in the Japanese people’s ways of thinking and life. The desire to understand the content of television dramas, animation, prose fiction, and magazines, traveling in Japan, or communicating with the Japanese people by learning Japanese were cited as well. A perception of Japanese as a tool for selecting an occupation and expressing oneself socially was also presented. As for learning styles, the students preferred solitary learning or individual guidance to pair or group learning. They also preferred teachers who were fluent in both Japanese and Korean.