Influence of Loanwords on English Usage by Japanese Learners of English

Abstract

This study explores the impact of learners' pre-existing knowledge of loanwords on their English usage. An error identification and correction task, and a questionnaire were assigned to 86 high school students (27 first-year and 59 second-year high school students) and 34 university students in Japan. The data was analyzed in terms of the following two aspects: (a) influence of Japanese EFL learners' knowledge of English-derived words on their English usage and (b) a hierarchy of word difficulty among the five different types of loanwords. The finding has shown that negative transfer of English loanwords could be seen in learners' English usage. The study also found the existence of words' difficulty among different types of loanwords: Speech Modification > Semantic Modification > Wasei Eigo (Janglish) > Morphological Modification > Straightforward Loanwords ('>' means 'is more difficult than').