Method for language sense acquisition: Based on an analysis of students’ sentence selection
2020 Volume 87 Pages 59-67
Details
2020 Volume 87 Pages 59-67
Developing an intuitive sense of language is crucial while learning Japanese; however, the lack of objective evaluation methods makes it difficult to procure instructional results. This study identifies and visualizes elements of objective measurements of “language sense” acquisition and proposes strategies for improving Japanese language education materials and methods.
To achieve this, in aiming at shifting the viewpoint of language sense measurement from the traditional instructor’s end to the learner’s end, we conducted an experiment wherein university students compared sentences with an original sentence, selecting the easiest one to understand. Further, common characteristics most frequently selected by students were an increase in punctuation marks and changes in their placements and division of 75-character-long text into two sentences. Objectively measurable elements were visualized and identified, revealing that the students made these choices intuitively.
Based on these results and an investigation of past educational practices, this study proposes the following as teaching methods for acquiring language sense: reading comprehension instruction, focusing on a sentence’s length and placement of punctuation, and instructions for creating examples in specified formats.
