Lecturer:
Takehiro Kanaya, University of Montreal, Canada
Hisae Akihiro, University of Provence, France
Discussants: Yuji Kawaguchi, Hiroko Fujimori, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Date: Tuesday, 19 July 2011, 17:40-19:50
Venue: Sakura Hall, TUFS Fuchu campus
This series of research seminars aims to consider the way to link the achievements in language studies to Japanese education, i.e. become the interface between language studies and the classrooms.
In the first seminar, two Japanese language teachers teaching in French-speaking universities, Mr. Kanaya and Ms.Akihiro, presented their research on (so-called) "ellipsis" of the subject and object in Japanese and French and fielded questions from the more than 30 participants who were present despite the rain that day.
Mr. Kanaya of the University of Montréal, compared the basic constructions of Japanese and French, and claimed that the strong relationship between the subject and verb in French and English meant that the verb form changed with the subject, but that there was no subject in Japanese because the verb was independent of the personal pronoun in basic constructions in Japanese.
On the other hand, Ms. Akihiro of the University of Provence, introduced examples of French Japanese learners erroneously overusing ellipsis of the object in Japanese, and pointed out non-anaphoric ellipses that occurred frequently in French as the reason for these errors. She proposed teaching collocations between the verb and object from an early stage to prevent these errors from occurring. In addition, as the presence of ellipsis and repetition of a pronoun followed discourse rules, it would be necessary to provide meticulous instruction at the discourse level from an early stage in Japanese education.
Responding to the two presentations, Prof. Kawaguchi stated that it was necessary to start from a discussion of whether or not it was necessary to engage an American-European language perspective of verb transitivity when discussing ellipsis. He went on to explain how the reduction of French verb conjugations since the 15th century was one of the triggers causing the French language to shift from an XVO structure to SVO structure. On the other hand, Prof. Fujimori stated from the perspective of Japanese language education, that it was essential to teach verbs and particles, and objects and verbs as pairs with a focus on sentence patterns to prevent global errors, and like Ms. Akihiro, also stressed the necessity of teaching Japanese not from the sentence level, but from a discourse level.
Mr. Kanaya spoke about the (so-called) ellipsis of Japanese subject from a typological point of view, while Ms. Akihiro gave examples of ellipses of objects in Japanese and French, and also introduced examples of errors in overusing ellipses of Japanese objects by French native speakers, caused probably by language transfer.
This research seminar reconfirmed the importance of teaching by accumulating sentence patterns in Japanese language education.
Photo gallery ( PDF )
Poster ( PDF )
