Abstract
The study aims to clarify characteristics of skills of language expression that students need to acquire before going to university in Japan from the perspective of linguistic manipulation of words. Several assessments have revealed that Japanese students tend to have difficulties answering descriptive questions. Thus, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology has been focusing on the enhancement of the skills of writing logically. However, few studies in the field of language education have examined the skills required when students are evaluated as having the ability to construct texts logically. The linguistic manipulation of words such as rephrasing or complementing given texts for writing answers properly has not been investigated sufficiently. This paper examined model answers of the university entrance examinations and identified what type of linguistic manipulation the students were expected to learn in order to write “well-described” answers. The analysis revealed the model answers were constructed mainly by extracting phrases from text verbatim, paraphrasing a sentence or clause, taking out an appropriate word, and complementing necessary words to make a complete sentence. On the other hand, the linguistic manipulation of referencing the expression of the text itself remained only a small percentage.
https://ror.org/057zh3y96 
