Can a Knowledge of Japanese Help our EFL Teaching?

Writer(s): 
John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, Sophia University

This paper challenges a number of assumptions which have become axioms of EFL pedagogy. There is often a tendency to regard the native tongues of one's students as a hindrance. Instead of thinking of them as "interference and other problems" (Thompson, 1987), is there no case for regarding the languages that students bring with them to the EFL classroom as a resource? Surely, learning is a process of attaining new knowledge by relating it to what is already known. Students are taking into the language classroom a body of highly sophisticated assumptions about language and how language works, based on their experience of their own language or languages. Since they will inevitably build on those assumptions in their efforts to acquire English, does it not make pedagogic sense for teachers to do the same? At the very least, simply as a matter of human respect, we might do well to reflect that there is at least one thing EFL students can do which their native speaker teachers in general cannot -- they can aII speak perfectly in a language other than English.

Admittedly, the assumptions that hold good in students' native languages will often not be applicable to the new language that they are seeking to acquire. But that is precisely where the teacher's awareness of those assumptions may be of value. Instead of disregarding them or being frustrated by them, the teacher could be actively moulding them, sometimes modifying them, sometimes challenging them, incorporating some and rejecting others.

 

This paper also prompts a review of one of EFL's most sacred cows -- the alleged supremacy of communicative methods over grammar teaching. Is it really necessary to reject a grammatical approach in order to espouse a communicative one? Isn't there a need for a more rounded approach, giving students a grounding in language structure at the same time as developing their communicative competence? It seems rather odd that EFL testing -- from the TOEFL to the Cambridge exams -- focuses on the very skills which many teachers abjure in their classroom practice. In the context of the possibly misguided, but nevertheless ineluctable realities of the examination system, neglecting to impart to one's students a sense of syntactic well-formedness may be construed as a very real failure.

Yet the reasoning behind this paper is not simply that grammatical knowledge is a necessity imposed on students by a rigorous examination system. For some years now the so-called Language Awareness movement has been attempting to rebuild the bridge between linguists and language teachers, and a body of research has accumulated showing that students who are able to discuss the linguistic properties (syntactic, phonological, etc.) of the target language are likely to reach a higher level of competence in that language than those who cannot (Masny, 1989). It is in the context of this school of thought and this body of evidence that the present paper is grounded.

 

The purpose of this paper is to examine the issues outlined above, taking Japanese as a case study. After summarising some of the main features of Japanese grammar, the paper focuses on left branching and topic-comment structure, outlining ways in which a knowledge of these features may affect our teaching: (a) helping us to understand the intended meaning of certain non-grammatical utterances made in English by Japanese students, (b) sensitising us to the complexity which certain English constructions represent to Japanese students, (c) causing us to feel less inclined to lose patience and more willing to devote extra time to explaining and aiding students to produce such utterances, (d) encouraging students to think about and discuss the properties of the target language, and (e) enabling us to help students perceive a spectrum of continuity underlying the linguistic structures of their own and the target languages.

Main Features of Japanese Grammar

 

Japanese is a language with no articles like the, a, or an. Pronouns are used mainly for emphasis or disambiguation:
(1)ai shiteiru
love be-doing
can mean either "I love you" or "she loves him," according to context. The verb usually comes at the end of the sentence, along with signals indicating mood, tense, modality, and so forth. Some adjectives conjugate for tense like verbs:
(2)yokatta
[it] gooded
"It was good."
Verbs do not inflect for person; there is nothing corresponding to third-person singular, present tense -s in English. Nouns are not usually marked for singular or plural: ki could mean "tree" or "trees." Lexical items which dictionaries typically list as nouns in fact perform other functions:
(3) Nihon wa anzen desu
Japan safety is
"Japan is safe"
(4) shinsetsu desu
he/she (e.g.) kindness is
"he/she is kind"
Clausal modification of a noun is left-branching, coming before the noun, rather than right-branching, coming afterwards, as in English relative clauses. A particle corresponding to English apostrophe-s is used much more widely in Japanese:
(5)kare no mae no kanojo
he 's before 's girlfriend
"his old girlfriend."
The typical sentence structure can be analysed as [1] topic, [2] topic development, [3] comment:
(6) [[[kare wa 1] baka 2] desu 3]
[[[he] stupid] is]
"He is stupid"
It is the contention of this paper that an awareness of any of these points would be of some use to the teacher of English to Japanese students. For the purposes of illustration, let us take two of these features, branching and topic-comment structure, and examine their pedagogical implications in more detail.

Branching

 

One area of linguistic research with direct applicability to second language acquisition is the work done on branching by Kuno and by Flynn (cited in Odlin, 1989) suggesting that "when two languages show a difference in principal branching directions, the acquisition of complex syntax will be more difficult" (p. 98). In practice, what this means is Japanese students of English are likely to have difficulty with (7).
(7) This is the rat that lived in the house that Jack built.

In much the same way, native English speakers learning Japanese might have problems with (8).

 

(8)neko ga oikaketa nezumi ga tabeta chiizu wa kusatte ita
cat-chased-rat-ate-cheese rotten was
(9) "The cheese the rat the cat chased ate was rotten."

Sentence (9) is not ungrammatical, but no one would normally utter such a sentence. We might say something like:

 

(10) The cat chased the rat which ate the cheese. The cheese was rotten.

The reason for the awkwardness of (9) lies in the fact that, in English, clauses which give information about a noun ("the house that Jack built," "the rat that the cat chased," etc.) are right-branching, coming after the noun. In Japanese, on the other hand, such information comes before the noun:

 

(11)kore wa jaku ga tateta ie ni sundeiru nezumi desu
this Jack-built-house live-in-rat is
"This is the rat that lives in the house that Jack built."
Since sentences like (11) are fairly infrequent in Japanese, and the thought would more usually be expressed by breaking it up into two sentences, it is clear that the syntax of (7) represents a learning difficulty for Japanese students. What is true of noun-modifying clauses is also true of a wide range of other clausal constructions:

  • (12a) when I was a youth...
  • (12b) he didn't go because he had no money

  • (12c) although I liked him I didn't want to marry him
  • (12d) just because you are twenty it doesn't mean you can do anything you like.

The corresponding constructions in Japanese are as follows:

 

  • (13a) [watashi ga] wakamono no toki . . .
  • [I] youth when . . .
  • (13b) [kare ga] o-kane wo motteinakatta node, ikanakatta
  • [he] money had not because, didn't go
  • (13c) [kare ga] suki datta kedo, kekkon shitakunakatta
  • [him] liked although, marriage didn't-want-to-do
  • (13d) [anata ga] hatachi dakara to itte, nandemo dekiru wake dewa nai
  • [you] twenty just because, anything can-do situation isn't.

In each case, while the boldface English words in (12a-d) precede or introduce a clause, the corresponding Japanese words in (13a-d) come at the end. In other words, clauses -- one of the basic building-blocks of language -- are, in general, constructed in English in a diametrically opposite fashion to Japanese.

Is it really acceptable to dismiss an awareness of such profound systematic differences between English and Japanese as irrelevant to the EFL classroom? May such an awareness not help us to understand the intended meaning of such common utterances as "my read book" for "the book I read"? Doesn't it open our eyes to the difficulties our students face in attempting certain English constructions, and foster respect that they even try, rather than irritation that they don't always get it right?

 

In terms of actual teaching practice, we ought, first, to bear in mind that in teaching English clause structure to Japanese students, we are doing something more closely analogous to teaching someone who can already throw a ball to throw it left-handed instead of right-handed, than to teaching someone who cannot throw a ball at all. Tasks we could set might include, in reading and writing classes, focusing students' attention on certain constructions by, for example, asking them first to highlight certain words (e.g.when, although, because) in red, and then to identify the following clause by highlighting it in green. We might even present them with a number of examples of problematic constructions, invite them first to translate them into Japanese and then to devise more English sentences based on the same structural pattern. Or we might set problems such as the following sentence combining activity:

Combine these three sentences into one English sentence.
i. A man had a goat
ii. The goat ate the entire works of Shakespeare
iii.My father knew that man

(Answer: My father knew a man who had a goat that ate the entire works of Shakespeare.)
Such exercises might give a structural focus to reading exercises and would be an improvement on the chokuyaku (literal, word-for-word) translation exercises found in most Japanese textbooks for learners of English. They may seem a far cry from the communicative methods used by many EFL teachers -- and so they are -- but that is not to say that they have no place in the language classroom. Nor do they have to be dry and academic. Highlighting constructions in reading material can be done in groups, with students putting their findings on posters to display around the classroom; problem-solving can take the form of a class quiz, with students scoring points for their team, and so on.

 

It is also possible to achieve a degree of integration of communicative methods and the study of language structure, though only if one allows that discussion of the formal properties of the target language may in itself constitute a communicative activity. Let us consider this possibility in relation to the topic-comment structure of Japanese.

Topic-comment structure

 

Japanese is typically analysed as a topic-comment language (Hinds, Maynard & Iwasaki, 1984). Detailed analysis of the differences between sentence subject and topic would take an entire monograph, but the following examples illustrate some of the difficulties Japanese speakers face in trying to render a topic, signalled by wa, into English:

  • (14a)watashi wa totemo tsukaremashita
  • I [topic marker] very tired
  • "I am very tired."
  • (14b) kyou wa totemo tsukaremashita
  • today [topic marker] very tired
  • "today I'm (e.g.) very tired."

Sentence (14b) explains a frequent error, "today is very tired," along with many similar errors.
As (6) above, shows, Japanese sentence structure more closely resembles the language of logic - or even of transformational grammar deep structure. Let us take a closer look at one aspect of this resemblance, the positioning of features marking mood and mode. Consider this analysis of English auxilaries (15a-c) and raising0 (15d):

  • (15a) He doesn't go
  • [he goes] marked for negative mood
  • (15b) He can go
  • [he goes] marked for ability
  • (15c) He must go
  • [he goes] marked for obligation
  • (15d) He seems to go
  • [he goes] marked for appearance or supposition.
  • Compare their (partially analyzed) Japanese equivalents (16a-d):
  • (16a)kare wa ikanai
  • he [topic marker] go not
  • (16b) kare wa iku koto ga dekiru
  • he [topic marker] go can
  • (16c) kare wa ikanakereba naranai
  • he [topic marker] go must
  • (16e) kare wa iku rashii
  • he [topic marker] go seem.

The analysis of doesn't, can, must, and seems as marking the proposition "he goes" in (15a-d) bears systematic comparison with the way such utterances are constructed in Japanese in (16a-d). Practical applications of this sytematic similarity include inviting students to mark simple sentences for advice, obligation, supposition, and so forth; classroom analysis of sentences from newspapers and other reading material; and helping students to express mood and mode correctly in their own utterances. All these exercises are enhanced by a teaching approach that takes into account the fact that something which is usually signalled at the end of a Japanese sentence is often signalled in English by something before the verb.

 

Axiomatic in such exercises is the assumption that students are intelligent and perfectly capable of dealing with such concepts in their own language, and for this reason I will often help them by providing a list of some of the main terms they will need. For example, a list to enable students to discuss the primary auxiliaries might look like this:

present, genzai; future, mirai; past, kako; conditional, joukenkatei; continuous, keizoku; perfect (completed), kanryou; negative, futeiteki.

Using such a list, students will readily be able to say that, for example, "He was walking" illustrates a past continuous situation. Adding to the list words like obligation, advice, permission, ability, intention, supposition, necessity and so on will give even relatively low-level students the chance to show that they really do understand quite a lot of what is going on in an English sentence. Or, if they misdiagnose "he mustn't go," for example, as an absence of obligation, rather than as a prohibition, then such lists provide a framework for correcting them and providing further instruction.

 

Such an exercise is suited to group work in the language laboratory, where the aim would be for each group to study a text containing a number of target structures and to record a series of statements such as, "When the little girl is told by her mother, 'You mustn't do that!' this is an example of prohibition." The recordings and texts can then be passed around. Groups can listen to each other's work, accessing the teacher if they disagree or wish to query a point.

Further communication work arises when students are invited to discuss their findings. They will want to know why, for example, might in certain contexts refers to the future, or why have to was used in a given case and not must, or when must signals obligation and when it signals supposition (Rajaa Aquil, 1992). More advanced (and motivated) students can discuss such questions in groups (with teacher monitoring). A lower-level class might be invited to work in groups to formulate a list of questions about their findings, which could then be used as the basis for a teacher-led plenary discussion of the properties of modals.

Conclusion

If much of the foregoing seems to fly in the face of accepted EFL pedagogy, there is only one justification that needs to be made. That is, that despite the much-vaunted superiority of communicative methods over other language-teaching strategies, the contrast between the virtually universal success of children in acquiring their mother tongue and the high failure rate of L2 learners remains as stark as ever. There may be many reasons for this -- social, cultural and psychological -- but one possible contributory cause may lie in the failure of teachers to make meaningful connections between the target language and the mother tongue.

There are many types of students, and many types of teachers. A fully comprehensive EFL pedagogy would include strategies that gave all types the maximum opportunity to realise their potential. All the present paper proposes is that an approach which draws on a knowledge of students' own language(s), and uses that knowledge to build some kind of bridge between the students' existing expectations about language and the realities of English sentence structure, ought not to be rejected out of hand, but should be acknowledged as a potentially useful pedagogical tool.

 

References

  • Hinds, J., Maynard, S. K., & Iwasaki, S. (Eds.), (1984). Perspectives on topicalization: The case of Japanese "wa." Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Masny, D. (1989). The role of language and cognition in L2. In J. P. Lantolf & A. Labarca (Eds.), Research in second language learning (pp. 55­71). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
  • Odlin, T. (1989). Language transfer: Cross-linguistic influence in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Rajaa Aquil, C. F. (October 24th, 1992). The holistic teaching of modals. Paper presented at the Center for Adult and Continuing Education, the American University in Cairo.
  • Thompson, I. (1987). Japanese speakers. In M. Swan & B. Smith (Eds.), Learner English: A teacher¹s guide to interference and other problems (pp. 210-223). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

John R. Yamamoto-Wilson graduated in English from Cambridge University, and embarked on a research project into Spanish influences on English literature, leading to an M.Litt (Cantab). Took a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics. Also holds an RSA (Royal School of Arts) Diploma in EFL. Currently teaches in the Department of English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo.