Analysis of Native Speakers’ Appropriateness Judgment on the Speech Act of Complaining by Japanese EFL Learners

抄録

　　The present study aims to examine and identify the way in which native English speakers judge complaints realized by Japanese EFL learners. Previous studies have demonstrated that interrater variance exists in the assessment of EFL learners’ speech acts. Very little is known, however, about the underlying mechanisms of raters’ appropriateness judgment. Therefore, this study looked at the categories that native speakers’ appropriateness judgement. The Raters in this study comprised 25 Japanese intermediate-level EFL learners and four native speakers of English. The Japanese EFL learners were asked to complete a discourse completion task (DCT) in English with the task conditions consisting of five settings: four academic and one nonacademic. The native English speakers were invited to rate the appropriateness of the complaints taken from the DCT using a five-point rating scale, and were individually interviewed about the basis of the processes upon which they rated the appropriateness of the given complaints. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and qualitatively analyzed using the Modified Grounded Theory Approach. The analyses led to the construction of six categories and the structure of the judgment processes. The study’s pedagogical implication is that these six categories could be used as criteria of appropriateness judgment, which might help teachers assess the appropriateness of complaints realized by Japanese EFL learners.