Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this study is to analyze what kinds of evaluative strategies Hungarian and Chinese upper course learners of Japanese use to describe events in oral story telling tasks from I-JAS Corpus, and comparing that with expressions used by native Ja panese speakers.

Paper long abstract:

This study examines evaluative strategies on language use of Japanese learners in the narrative discourses. Story tellers have been found to use a variety of evaluative strategies to express their judgments and perspectives while telling a story. Evaluative strategies indicate the point of narrative and it is difficult for second language learners to use them in quantity and diversity (Chen, 2019). Whereas there is a significant body of research that compares narrative strategies by Japanese learners of Chinese, much less investigation has been done on narratives by Japanese learners of European language.

The purpose of this study is to analyze what kinds of evaluative strategies Hungarian(HL) and Chinese(CL) upper course learners of Japanese use to describe events in oral story telling tasks from the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second language (I-JAS), and comparing that with expressions used by native Ja panese speakers(JJ). Data was analyzed from 32 instances of oral storytelling in I-JAS corpus by upper course learners of Japanese (10 by HL and 22 by CL: SPOT score 80-85) and 17 by JJ.

The result showed that HL, CL used evaluative strategies twice as many as JJ, which were used to show their perspectives or attitude. However, there were differences in the use of strategies by HL, CL and JJ. (1) JJ put most of their references to "judgements" into the climax of narrative. In contrast, HL's references were to show unexpected result and CL to describe unnecessary scenes. (2) JJ's references to "internal emotional states" were used to highlight the climax of narrative, such as bikkurishita 'shocked'. However, HL did it to a much lesser degree and CL used it in unnecessary scenes yet. (3) Both CL and HL used degree adverbs and focus particles more than JJ.

The findings of the current study suggest that it may be difficult for upper course learners to empl oy those evaluative strategies to show the climax of the story. The findings from this study shed light on the need for the use of evaluative strategies in future L2 acquisition.