学習者の頭の中にある言語項目セット －言語項目セットの関連づけ－

Abstract

If you think of recognizing the similarities and differences of certain linguisticitems as ‘associating’, and call the associated groups of the items ‘Sets of RelatedWords (SRW)’, it’s safe to say that both SRW like ‘ト・バ・タラ・ナラ’ andassociating the sets are already being given to learners in current Japanese languageeducation. However, what kind of SRW the learners are recognizing and how theyare associating SRW themselves does not seem to have been proved ever. For thisreason, the purpose of this study is to reveal the process of associating SRW inlearner’s language use. In Noda(2001) points out that ‘able to use’ means ‘acquiring the opposition’(103p),and ‘acquiring the opposition’ means ‘acquiring the co-occurrence relationship’(104p). In this study, ‘opposition’ is treated as SRW, and ‘co-occurrence relationship istreated as a set of condition’s similarities and differences inside and outside thesentences using each form of SRW. Therefore, the point of view of this study islearning a language means acquiring the co-occurrence relationship of SRW. Basedon previous researches that have been limited to the subject of discussion aboutSRW given morphological and functional similarities, it’s the starting point ofdescribing SRW itself as a subject of this study which has been presented as apremise of this argument. Following is the method of the research performed with 7 intermediate learners. 1. Asking them to fill out blanks of the sentence “What is the difference between( ) and ( )?2. Interviewing the learners face to face with the SRW they wrote themselves. As a result of this research, 96 groups of SRW from 7 learners were all different,and could see the fact that each learner has various kinds of SRW. As well, someof the SRW were associated based on co-occurrence relationship, but the others werenot. Whether the associating was based on co-occurrence relationship or not was due to the learner’s actual language use, and had nothing to do with his mothertongue or language level. In conclusion, first, the SRW of learners is not the samebut various. Second, learners can associate words based on co-occurrence relationshiponly when they are related to the learners’ actual language use. If it is true thatlearning words means associating words and words, you should consider eachsituation of learners’ language use in studying words.