2023 年 30 巻 2 号 p. 137-142
The goal of this paper is to shed new light on the learning mechanism of second language knowledge in Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Although second language has long been assumed to be teachable as practiced in foreign language classrooms, the effect of negative evidence or corrections is inconclusive yet. The present study addresses a new research question: with no corrections at all, would grammatical error rates of autonomous Japanese EFL learners decline gradually? To answer this question, 71 Japanese EFL learners participated in an experiment of free English writing with no corrective feedback. The results showed that within one academic year, the grammatical error rate was lower in their writing in the second semester compared to the first. This tendency was found in morphosyntactic items with relatively high error rates such as determiners, agreement within a noun phrase, and prepositions. This suggests that second language learners with explicit grammar knowledge can notice and correct their errors by themselves even without explicit teaching, and that the question of to what extent it is the case should be further examined.
