Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous English acquisition for Japanese L2 learners English acquisition for Japanese L2 learners People often say that Japanese are bad language learners. One may agree on this point when he/she sees the ranking of the TOEFL average. Japan no doubt hits the worst score in Asia. However, there was, and still is, a myth where people believe that the Japanese students are good in Grammar as they study for the Entrance examination for years and years. But is that true?? It is not only the question about the talent of language learning. We can not simply conclude that Japanese students lack the talent of second language acquisition. It's more because of the educational system which puts weight on test-taking and score-getting. Although they do have a good knowledge of grammar and they can read and write according to what they have learned from the text book, it seems that most Japanese English speakers have problem in real-conversational-situation where they can't pick up what the NE speaker is saying, and make NE speaker to understand what they are saying. When we learn Japanese, we do not have to be taught to discover the phonemes of our language, We do it unconsciously at an early stage and know what they are. However, English is the second language that students encounter when they are 12 in middle school. They start off learning English from NNE teachers and mostly grammars. They would not have the chance to learn how to differenciate the phoneme in English, for example /r/and /l/sound. They may be able to convert some phonemes into similar sounds that exists in Japanese, but they would not understand to the smallest distinction that /l/ in leaf and /l/ in feel are different. That the position of the tongue can differ when it's lateral and velarized, but who cares? Within each language there are phonetically similar sounds that prove to be contrastive phonemically; i.e., the phonetic difference between them is linguistically meaningful in that language. Minimal pairs are frequently used to ‘prove’ that sounds are phonemic or contrastive: but would the Japenese English learners care? Normally, only phonetically similar sounds are contrasted; vowels and consonants are not usually contrasted since they often do not occur in the same position in a word. Likewise, sounds that are already phonetically quite distinct are not considered as variants of one sound; they are assumed to be two separate sounds (e.g., [m] and [r]).Every language system has rules about which sounds can begin and end a syllable or a word and which sounds can occur next to each other. A native speaker knows these patterns as a part of their linguistic knowledge. However, Japanese English learners will try to understand within their knowledge of Japanese. Implicational universals predict that a certain pattern or sound will occur if another similar pattern or sound is present in a given language. Such implicational universals include generalizations about sound inventories, the distribution of sounds, the acquisition of sounds by infants, and the process of language change. And for Japanese English speakers, it is extremely difficult to master English pronounciation and distinguish words in the sentence. Both precieving and producing. English uses an "uncommon" sound such as a nasalized vowel or an interdental obstruent, there will also be a more common sound similar to it (e.g., a non-nasalized vowel, an alveolar obstruent). And sounds that are less common in Japenese will occur in a more restricted set of positions in a syllable or word. Off course uncommon sounds are mastered later than the more common sounds. That is why Japanese people keeps on relying on purely Japanesed-pronounced sounds and do not try to produce the real sound. furthermore, less common sounds tend to be less stable than common sounds and are more susceptible to change. Substantive universals posit that every human language will have certain features or sounds. For example, all languages distinguish vowels from consonants. All languages also have at least one stop consonant. And another difference is, there are the most common theory of Japanese pitch accent predicts that words with final-accent and those with no accent have the same focontour within the word, and diverge only in the mora following the word. Pitch, accent, sounds, and speed differences are preventing Japanese English learners to distinguish words spolen by the native speakers. In the pronunciation of Japanese speakers of English. s/he often inserts a glottal stop or some temporal pause between C(C)VC to VC(C) (in either word or syllable boundaries, such as "got up", "biology"). The hunch is that a phonological transfer from Japanese is occurring. It's also the question whether if glides exist in Japanese-English, whether glottals are inserted in front of certain vowels, or what other influences there may be. Most English teacher does not bother to know the affects of the Japanese sound articulation to the foreign tongues? Some features in Asian-English like: consonants being Non-rhotic, Non-aspirated Alveolar retroflexion, No l-velarization,Vowels, No tense vowel diphthongization,No unstressed vowel reduction, Consonants-Final obstruent devoicing,Vowels-only tense vowels. For example, present study examined Japanese (J) speakers' perceptual assimilation of 11 American English (AE) vowels produced by four male speakers in two sets of materials: /hVba/ disyllables spoken in citation-form (lists) and in /hVb/ syllables embedded in a short carrier sentence. J listeners were asked to select the J vowel category to which each AE vowel was most similar and to rate its category goodness on a 7-point scale. While the overall pattern of assimilation to the five Japanese (J) vowel qualities (spectral assimilation pattern) was partially predictable on the basis of cross-language phonetic similarities, most people were not able to tell. There were also large differences across the two sets of materials in assimilation of long and short AE vowels to J long (2-mora) and short (1-mora) vowel categories (temporal assimilation pattern). The long AE vowels were perceived as similar to long J vowels only when they were produced and presented in sentence context. In a second study in which the final /a/ portions of the disyllables were electronically shortened, assimilation of long AE vowels to long J categories did not differ from the original disyllable condition. This suggests that the better temporal differentiation of long and short AE vowels in the sentence condition was due to the presence of a larger rhythmic context. They have difficulty in picking up sounds (vowels) they are not familiar to. (Reiko Akahane-Yamada, Rieko Kubo, Sonja A. Trent, Kanae Nishi, James J. Jenkins 1998) Japanese English learners especially have a problem in phonological learning and inherent phonetic contrastiveness in the perception of non-native sounds. They mostly have difficulties in perceiving foreign sounds and have the tendency to convert foreign sounds to their nearest native (L1) phonemic sounds. This is not purely because Japanese language does not have the similar phonemic sound to English, but due to the lack of practicing. Most Japanese students do not get expose to NE speakers in daily life or be taught by NE speakers at school. The ideal enviroment should be: there is the individual student going through the process of acquiring an L2 in school. Central to that student's acquisition of language are all of the surrounding social and cultural processes occurring in everyday life within the student's past, present, and future, in all contexts -- home, school, community, and the broader society. Sociocultural processes include individual students' emotional responses to school, such as self-esteem, anxiety, or other affective factors. However, in most English classes, it's the one-way grammar-based education where NNSTeachers read out text books and follows grammatical explanations. Children will have no excitements during the class nor opportunity to use them on the street. It is claimed that if children can begin to acquire a second language at an early age they will find it easier to develop fluency, and will speak it without an accent. Age is a factor in acquiring one's mother tongue, and this also applies when learning a second language. One essential to developing such a skill is the ability to switch from one language to the other, as appropriate. Studies on the effects of age on this learning are already proven by manay linguists. It is clear that if they start at the age of 12 years they are learning it like any other subject they study. If the opportunity is present, surely it is better to acquire a second language than learn it. And that Adult language learners are notorious for their lack of ultimate mastery of language structure. However in Japan, schools do not expect students to be a good speaker. Acquiring the right pronouciation may even come the last when they study English at school. In reality, during the course of the students' language development (an innate ability all humans possess for acquisition of oral language) children should be taught formal teaching of language in school along with the pronounciation and followed by the acquisition of the written system of language. This includes the acquisition of the oral and written systems of the student's L1 and L2 across all language domains, such as phonology (the pronunciation system); vocabulary, morphology, and syntax (the grammar system); semantics (meaning); pragmatics (how language is used in a given context); paralinguistics (nonverbal and other extralinguistic features); and discourse (stretches of language beyond a single sentence). To assure cognitive and academic success in the L2, a student's L1 system, oral and written, must be developed to a high cognitive level at least through the elementary school years. Teachers recognize that each language is best acquired throughout schooling by means of natural and rich language use, oral and written, across the curriculum. Bibliography: Word Count: 1592
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