Examining the development of pragmatics of Chinese JFL students

The field of interlanguage pragmatics has burgeoned since late 20th century. Requests, as a part of speech act theory, have been investigated by many scholars. This cross-sectional study explores the acquisition of pragmatics of Chinese learners of Japanese in foreign language contexts (JFL) by examining their request usages, which incorporates pragmatic transfer as a tool to interpret data. Discourse completion task (DCT) questionnaires were distributed to first-year, second-year and fourth-year Japanese learners at a university in China, as well as to native speakers in the U.S. to elicit requests. Requests were analyzed according to the following six categories: perspectives, speech levels, strategies, syntactic downgraders, semantic downgraders, and supportive moves. Based on data analysis, the preliminary findings are: 1) Significant improvement from the first- year group to the second-year group can be observed. 2) In general, the fourth-year group performed similar to or less native-like than the second-year group. 3) Regardless of the advancement, a gap still exists between learners and native speakers regarding pragmatics proficiency. The study not only sheds light on the evolution of learners’ interlanguage from a perspective of pragmatics, but can also reveal part of the current teaching and learning situations of Japanese pragmatics at universities in China. By discussing learners' success and potential areas that need developing, the findings could provide some meaningful implications for Japanese pedagogy

Hiding your emotions in plain sight: Differences between real anger and feigned anger in Japanese girls\u27 speech

This paper demonstrates the use of non-denotative meaning markers as a way of indicating a speaker’s emotional state. Japanese has a number of such markers, and they pattern differently according to the speaker’s emotion; creating distinctions between speech acts under various emotional circumstances. This paper examines the dialogue of three fictional characters from Japanese television and demonstrates visible differences in their speech patterns between real anger and feigned anger

An Interlanguage Pragmatic View: The Influence of Vietnamese Native Language and Culture on Their L2 Production and Comprehension

This research paper explores language performance of Vietnamese English learners from an interlanguage (IL) pragmatic perspective. Pragmatic competence has been set alongside with linguistic competence to the contribution of successful intercultural communication. It is clear that pragmatic knowledge of the L1 has influenced the production of learners’ IL and L2. This thesis uses comparative approach in analyzing language production of native speakers of English and native speakers of Vietnamese, and comparing it with the IL produced by Vietnamese learners to examine the differences in pragmatic performance among the three groups. These data are also analyzed quantitatively from cultural viewpoints of the mother tongue and the target language. The paper then explains some internal and external factors resulting in negative pragmatic transfer. Finally, it provides some pedagogical recommendations for teachers to help Vietnamese learners improve their competence in L2 sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics. The methods presented here stress on the important role of language educators and instructors in terms of building cross-cultural awareness as well as pragmatic competence in the target language in addition to teaching grammatical structures

The 101 translation problems between Japanese and German/English

We investigate differences between Japanese and German/English and explain characteristic phenomena to Japanese. The study helps us to realize what can be problematic when translating Japanese into German/English and vice versa