What did the child do with the bottle?

1. In order to fully state what the child did with the bottle, one must refer to a set of actions (e.g., taking and putting), characters (e.g., the child, the older lady), objects (e.g., the bottle), and locations (e.g., in the purse) and connect between them correctly (cf., Tarone & Yule, 1989; Yule 1997). The table below shows what types of linguistic expressions the learners and native speakers use to refer to each element:

As the table shows, in some cases the learners use the same vocabulary used by the NSs (e.g., おばあさん‘grand-mother,’ 取る ‘to take,’ ボトル ‘bottle,’ 入れる ‘to put’). All four used different noun phrases for the child, but they all seem equally effective. Interestingly, both the learners incorrectly refer to a purse as 財布 ‘wallet’. This may be due to transfer of training because they have learned ‘purse’ means female財布 in Japanese. In other cases, NSs are more precise, as for instance, in referring to location. Where they use ‘の中に(into),’ Sebastian uses ‘に(to/at/in)’ and Maximus does not add any particles at all.


The learners also seem to have some issues with making syntactic connections between these elements. Their incorrect use of particles leads some confusion. For instance, Sebastian uses the topical marker ‘wa’ for the bottle when it should be marked as an object (e.g., “ボトルは、おばあさんの財布に取ります”). Maximus omits a particle for location where he should not (e.g., “おばあさんの、あー、財布、この酒を入れて”). As we examined in the Error Analysis section, activity 2, the acquisition of particles for these learners seems to be at an early developmental stage.  

2. The table below shows what types of linguistic expressions the learners use to refer to each element in their written version of the event:

For both learners, the written narrative is more precise and native-like than their oral narratives. Both refer to actions (e.g., 取る‘to take,’ 入れる‘to put’), characters (e.g., 子供が‘child’、ケリが ‘Kelly’), and objects (e.g., お酒を‘alcohol,’ お酒一本を‘a bottle of alcohol’) using  effective lexical items. (In addition, Sebastian uses more kanji (Chinese characters) and spells more accurately than Maximus does.) As we discussed in the Learner section in Activities 1 and 2, this may be due to differences in their learning experiences and learning style preferences; Sebastian enjoyed learning in his Japanese classes, while Maximus said he learned the language most while he was in Japan.