Chinese learners' acquisition of Japanese adjectival collocations

A composition error analysis and pedagogical implications

Abstract

　Analyzing compositions written by intermediate-level Chinese learners, this study investigates both quantitatively and qualitatively the acquisition of adjectival collocations and examines LI transfer effects. Specifically, the study focuses on collocations involving nouns and i-adjectives and nouns and na-adjectives. Error analysis revealed that (1) almost 20% of the composition collocations were errors and (2) while learners tend to use more basic attributive i-adjectives, na-adjectives are more frequent at advanced levels. Based on these findings, the paper discusses the following pedagogical implications for improving adjectival usage: (1) applying Chinese-Japanese contrastive analysis to adjective instruction, (2) extracting examples for polysemous adjectives from corpora, (3) emphasizing typical restrictions on adjective usages, and (4) exploiting positive transfer effects from Chinese for the effective instruction of na-adjective usages.