Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this study is to analyze which expressions do intermediate learners of Japanese use to describe unexpected events on their writing story telling tasks of the I-JAS corpus. Through comparison with oral tasks, I will clarify the differences in expressions in terms of planning time.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this study is to analyze which expressions do intermediate learners of Japanese use to describe unexpected events on their writing story telling tasks of the I-JAS corpus. Through comparison with oral story telling tasks, I will clarify the differences in expressions produced between speaking and writing tasks in terms of planning time.

Yuan and Ellis (2003) mentioned the planning time and time constraints of tasks that affect the learner's language processing. Okuno and Dianni (2015) found the variability of accuracy and complexity in the use of passive patterns in speaking verses writing tasks of Japanese learners. However, few studies attempt to see the interlanguage variability used in a specific situation. Therefore, in this research, I focused on the unexpected event which is the important part in discourse.

The data used in this study consists of intermediate Japanese language learners from four countries, 15 speakers each of Korean, Chinese, English and Hungarian, for a total of 60 learners and 15 Japanese native speakers.

Through my research, I found there were four different features of using expressions: 1) Conjunctions, 2) Topic and Subject Marker, 3) Adverb, 4) Others, between native speakers and learners. Specifically, native speakers used conjunctions not only to describe the events along a time axis but also them to　show their surprise as an evaluation of the event. For example, native speakers used "suruto" and "-to" as a conjunction, with the intent to indicate an unexpected event in the following clause. However learners used "-toki" and "-te" as a conjunction, which only connect two events in order. Furthermore, I also found leaner's variability in the use of these expressions in speaking verses writing tasks. For example, learners did not use "-to" in speaking tasks despite the fact native Japanese often use it as a conjunction, however some learners use it in writing tasks with planning time. Based on these results, I conclude that intermediate learners already know some expressions, which show their evaluation toward the unexpected event, as a metalinguistic knowledge, however it might be difficult for them to employ those expressions intuitively during oral tasks.