My paper presents the preliminary results of a cross-sectional study on interlanguage pragmatics conducted on a group of native English speakers learning Japanese as second language. The object of inquiry is the development of linguistic and pragmatic competence in the use of a particular set of Japanese verbs - the verbs of giving and receiving, or ‘benefactive’ verbs - specifically in their use as auxiliaries, and in event reports (as opposed to addressee oriented speech acts, more crucially constrained by setting-related face-work).

A linguistic test and an oral interview were carried out in Japan on learners ranging from beginner to advanced proficiency level, and on a Japanese-speaker control group.

The paper attempts an analysis of how the function of these auxiliary verbs is represented by the language learners. Several examples from the NNS’s production are discussed in relation to the subject’s mother tongue -English- and their level of proficiency. Preferred syntactic constructions are identified: all learners prefer active-like to passive-like constructions. Proficiency relates to frequency of use, but not to type of preferred construction. Additionally, no clear relation between proficiency and specific semantic contexts (in this paper, events that involve a participant and events that do not) has been identified. Depending on whether the event directly involves a participant or not (i.e. whether the V has more than two arguments or not), the inclusion of a benefactive in the main predicate is either compulsory or optional from the viewpoint of grammaticality judgments. Evidence in this research rules out the criteria of grammatical obligatority as a constraint on learning, and indicates that acquisition does not proceed linearly from more compulsory to less compulsory environments.

Many studies of L2 learning suggest it is useful for learners to identify cognates, i.e., L2 words considered as related to L1 words by L2 learners, but there are few studies of how learners' ability develops in this area, particularly in Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language. This empirical study investigated how the ability of English-speaking learners of Japanese to use cognate strategies differs between listening and reading on their first meeting of cognates in Japanese and how their ability changes over the period of their stay in Japan. 81 British elementary and intermediate learners of Japanese in a British university were tested on audio and visual identification of 32 English loan-word cognates and 8 non-cognates that they had never met before. The main finding was that, in contrast with the outcomes of Hammer (1975) and Browne (1982) for English learners of French, (a) spoken cognates were significantly easier to identify than written cognates for those who had stayed in Japan for less than one year, (b) learners improved cognate identification skills in reading significantly better than those in listening over the period of their stay in Japan, (c) written cognates became as easy to identify as spoken cognates for those who had stayed in Japan for more than one year.

The use of Japanese linguistic politeness (LP) ¹ is a subject which has long been emphasized in the field of Japanese language teaching as a second language. It has, however, for the most part been considered in terms of its obligatory aspect - that is to say, in terms of the constraints put on the individual by Japanese socio-cultural norms. This article proposes instead, that this obligatory aspect of how Japanese LP is used accounts for only a part of the processes by which Japanese language speakers manipulate LP. This article, which focuses on polite forms such as desu/masu ² and address forms, therefore, proposes that another aspect - what the author considers might be termed the volitional use ³ - demands investigation in order to bring both students and teachers of Japanese to a more rounded understanding of the practical applications of Japanese LP use.

In conclusion, the author will propose the importance of using real life examples of social interactions observed between Japanese native speakers at both the classroom and textbook level in order for the Japanese non-native speaker to acquire communicative competence in Japanese LP.

The aim of this paper is to examine the general characteristics and differences between two Japanese conjunctive particles kara and node from the point of view of pragmatics. We propose a hypothesis that the difference can be attributed to their basic relations. The usage of node is based on causality, the relationship between events or states of affairs that have already occurred, whereas that of kara is based on implication, defined as inferable meaning dependent on any background knowledge.

This difference generates different information structures of the sentences. When kara is used the information that the two clauses are connected is regarded as shared, while when node is used it is regarded as only belonging to the speaker. Their difference in politeness is explained by this relation: to presuppose the hearer's beliefs realises positive politeness and to avoid such a presupposition realises negative politeness, in terms of Brown and Levinson (1987).

Does the language used by second language speakers differ from that of native speakers? Most people would think of less proficiency or inferiority of second language learners compared with native speakers in terms of the mastery or command of the language. It is natural, however, that the language used by the second language learners would be different from that of monolingual native speakers in that the former language users have two (or more) different, but coexisting languages in mind, while the latter possess just one language in the same human capacity of mind.

Cook (1991a) introduced a concept of "multicompetence" in the field of Second Language Acquisition research and claimed that multicompetence as ‘a compound state of mind with two languages’ is totally different from a monolingual competence rather qualitatively than quantitatively. That is, the two languages in one brain are inter-related and influence each other as a single, unique language system as a whole, and this holistic language system is not just an addition of two individual monolingual systems.

Small-scale research was administered to investigate whether and how the cross-linguistic influences can be observed in the use of Japanese loanwords of English origin and their corresponding English words by Japanese-English speakers. Two different paradigms were used for the purpose of the current research: Japanese word-association task and cross-linguistic word recognition experiment. In both tests, some significant results of strong cross-linguistic influences were gained between those Japanese loanwords and English words.

Taking into consideration of the observed results that support the "multicompetence" perspective, some aspects of the nature of the bilingual mental lexicon of Japanese-English speakers are discussed.

Some approaches and methods to make kanji instruction more suitable for non-native learners of Japanese are suggested, paying attention to the fact that kanji classes are short so that it is necessary to seek the most efficient ways to make use of limited class hours. In particular, a detailed procedure for teaching the phonetic compounds is introduced.

Instruction in the phonetic compounds is important as it covers 70-80% of all kanji. The method of teaching students the basic rules as well as ways of introducing the exceptions and avoiding over-application of rules are discussed. Use of authentic video material for kanji teaching is also mentioned.

The paper shows how systematic kanji classes can enhance students’ understanding of the nature of kanji and guide them to find rules and strategies for their future learning of kanji.

Students’ progress and feedback are introduced and conclusions drawn.

Students learning kanji-related vocabulary often experience an inability to keep long-term memory and suffer from 'indigestion' from learning new vocabulary all the time. As an aid to solving these problems, a classroom activity is introduced which focuses on increasing the opportunities for repeated encounter of the same words and on acquiring vocabulary that is required for understanding particular topics.

This involves reading English newspaper articles and checking on details in the news, and then reading the Japanese counterparts and trying to guess the meanings of the target words. Led by clear contexts, students can guess the meaning quite accurately. And by knowing the content of the news, they can finish reading the whole article by the end of a one-hour class. It also becomes easier for the teacher to channel students' attention to towards kanji-related vocabulary rather than reading comprehension. The teacher can take advantage of the fact that newspaper articles use key words repeatedly.