The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the order of acquiring Japanese non-deictic demonstratives by a naturalistic learner changes with the variation of inputs. Since previous studies of Sakoda (1998, 2001) about the acquisition order of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) concluded that the different order of acquiring ‘ko', ‘so', and ‘a' is related to the inputs that the learner had experienced, this study predicted that "The acquisition order of nondeictic demonstratives of the naturalistic learner who did not receive input in the classroom is different from the order of classroom learner". The findings were confirmed by using the data from the Sakoda Corpus A, the three-year utterance data of a naturalistic learner of Japanese, the frequency of using the demonstratives by his interviewer and the native speakers of Basic Transcription System for Japanese(BTSJ). The result are as follows: As Sakoda (1998, 2001) pointed out, input may influence the appearance order for ‘ko', ‘so', and ‘a'. However, if the productivity in language use is considered, the acquisition order of the naturalistic learner is not different from the order of classroom learners, which likely means that there is a universal process in L2 learners' acquisition in spite of different inputs in or outside classroom.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the effects of family backgrounds, social stratifications, social networks, and family backgrounds in relation to undergraduate students' approaches to job searching in Shandong, a region of China. As the job shortage problem for university graduates has worsened, many researchers focus on the job search practices of undergraduates. Only a few surveys investigated the effects of one's family backgrounds on his or her idea for job searching. It is especially difficult to find researches that focus on the effects of social networks and family power. In this paper, different family backgrounds were analyzed and the study reached the following conclusions: (1) undergraduates in the region attached greater importance to the welfare and comfortableness of a workplace, than their career perspective; (2) social networks and family power rather than the social status of their parents significantly affect the undergraduates' approach to job searching; (3) one undergraduate who considers his privileged family background a benefit to his job search, while the other, who without a privileged family background was discouraged.

This study investigated how Japanese language learners also to be referred to as nonnative speaker of Japanese (NNS) and native speakers of Japanese (NS) manage the use of the referent markers in order to demonstrate topic continuity in Japanese oral narratives. Narrative discourse produced by learners of Japanese whose native language (English) is typologically distant from Japanese. The results showed that (1) NNSs used the definite marking (-ga) to encode referent introduction, even though NSs used indefinite marking (-wa) as expected. (2) NNSs performed zero anaphora as a target-like use of known referent introduction and referent maintenance. (3) NNSs used noun phrase (NP) + ‘wa' to encode referent re-introduction in the context of topic switching as a target-like use. It was also found that NNSs are unable to use the form-function mappings of NP+ ‘wa' (indefinite marking) and NP +‘ga' (definite marking)」 appropriately. However in relation to the use of zero anaphora, NNSs are able to correctly convey the topic / subject to whom the zero anaphora is referring.