Paper short abstract:

This research aims to analyze logical structures and conjunctions found in the statement-making task by Japanese native speakers and English-speaking leaners of Japanese. It was found that native speakers often used "~kedo" and "~ga" whereas learners mainly used "demo" for counterarguments.

Paper long abstract:

Along with the announcement of " 300,000 Foreign Students Plan" by Japanese government in 2008, the number of international students coming to Japanese universities and other higher education institutions has been increasing. Accordingly, those international students are required to make a presentation, participate in discussions in academic situations more often than before. For advanced language learners, those are some of the important academic skills as well as combining and linking sentences into a coherent discourse or a paragraph (ACTFL, 2012). Muramatsu(1997), however, argues that it is difficult for intermediate/advanced language learners to make a coherent discourse or a paragraph. Ishizuka & Narita(2004) point out that the factor effecting the difficulty is the logical structure differences between learners' first language and the target language. Kondo(2004) also points out the differences of how the conjunctions are used in two languages as the factor effecting the difficulty. With that said, it is obvious that the factor has not yet been sufficiently investigated and requires further research.

This research aims to analyze logical structures and contradictory conjunctions in counterarguments found in the statement-making task by 23 English-speaking learners of Japanese and 33 Japanese native speakers. The participants were all graduate/undergraduate students.

The result showed that the logical structures found in advanced learners and Japanese native speakers were similar among participants whereas the use of contradictory conjunctions was different; Japanese native speakers often used "~kedo" or "~ga" as the conjunctions for their counterarguments, while on the other hand learners frequently used "demo" to make counterarguments. This is a distinctive feature found mostly in intermediate learners.