A book for teachers responsible for foreign language education in Korea and researchers studying second language acquisition!

This book is a Korean translation of "Japanese Grammar Acquisition and the Results of Room Guidance in Second Language Acquisition as Seen Through Cognitive Applications" written by Kaoru Koyanagi and Fuyuki Mine, researchers in second language acquisition.


I am sometimes asked what teaching methods are good when teaching a foreign language in the classroom.
I believe that a good teaching method is one that motivates students to learn a foreign language and fosters the strength to continue learning, which ultimately leads to improved operational skills and a sense of accomplishment.
To this end, rather than applying a specific teaching method across the board, it will be necessary to provide flexible educational interventions tailored to the individual characteristics and cognitive mechanisms of each learner.


To answer the question of what kind of educational interventions are effective in foreign language acquisition, this book presents various research results and theories based on scientific experiments.
Many foreign language classes still focus on repetitively teaching learned knowledge in the classroom. However, the effectiveness of teaching varies depending on the educational intervention that maintains the content in long-term memory and leads to actual language use.
This book provides meaningful insights into the research findings to date on what teaching methods are educationally effective.

1.1 In the flow of ‘brain science and education’
These days, the topic of 'brain science and education' is often a hot topic both domestically and internationally.
The movement to apply the achievements of brain science to education is popular worldwide.
For example, with the advancement of brain science, 'baby science' (Koisei 2003) has advanced, and discussions on how to raise children according to brain development are also active.
It is said that people in the past often said, “Habits formed at the age of three last until the age of eighty.”
Even today, it is known that the period from birth to three years of age is an important period for brain development.
I'm losing.
So, in line with the findings of brain science, a special article on early education for children aged 0-3 is published in Newsweek magazine every year.
Also, recently, it has been said that children spend a lot of time playing video games or on computers and do not play outside much. This phenomenon has become an issue when someone appeared in a neuroscience study and proposed the existence of something like a 'game brain'.
There are frequent warnings that the brains of generations exposed to long-term television and computers from a young age are negatively affected not only cognitively but also emotionally.
Examples like these are common not only in other countries but also in Japan, where the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology launched a review committee in 2002 on the topic of “brain science and education” and attempted to elucidate learning mechanisms tailored to brain development and the brain’s internal mechanisms.
--- pp.17-18

4.2 Comparative study on learning types in SLA
In SLA research on the effectiveness of guidance, 'explicit/implicit' is used not only to refer to the type of learning in which grammar rules are initially explained or not, but also to compare the effectiveness of explicit feedback, such as explicitly pointing out errors or explaining the cause of errors, versus implicit feedback, such as subtly presenting sentences with corrected errors.
Grammar explanations are also sometimes presented within meaningful communication activities.
Empirical research like this will be covered in Chapter 4, and here we will examine empirical research on SLA that compares explicit and implicit learning, conducted in parallel with the paradigm of experimental research in cognitive psychology.
That is, this study compared explicit learning, in which rules are presented and students practice applying them, with implicit learning, in which rules are not presented but many examples are presented.
In language education, how teachers manipulate metalinguistic information is a key concern related to the success or failure of SLA.

--- p.97

2.1.1 Postpositions
A particle of case is a particle that is attached to the end of a noun and indicates the relationship between the verb or adjective/adjective-verb that comes in the predicate and the noun.
Here, we would like to suggest the acquisition of ① the particle 'に' and 'で' indicating location, and ② the particle 'を' and 'に' indicating the object of verbs expressing emotion, which are often used interchangeably by Japanese learners.


a.
〈Particles indicating place 'に' and 'で'〉
Various studies have pointed out that the mixed use of the place markers 'に' and 'で' is frequently seen in Japanese produced by learners (Ishida 1996; Kyuoda 1994; Kyuoda 1998, 2001; Nakagawa 1995; Matsuta Tou 1992; Rin 1995, etc.).

In the beginner level, you learn the particle 'ni' as a particle that indicates a point of arrival or a place of existence, and the particle 'de' as a particle that indicates a place or range where an action is performed.
As can be seen from examples (5)~(8), the entire predicate phrase is not simply used to distinguish whether it expresses a state or an action.
For example, the objective fact that the place where the character "Taro" is is a library is the same in both (6) and (7), but the particle must be used differently depending on the verb.

--- p.126

However, although it is a study that analyzed the written Japanese language, Sabo (1998, pp.
56-57) stated that in Japanese, long constituents tend to come before short ones, and this is due to basic reasons related to communication.
This is because when a long component, especially one containing many verbs, comes later, the modifying relationship with the preceding noun phrase becomes confusing.
In fact, in the following (108), when processing language at the beginning of a sentence, the fact that the actor of '座る' is not '太' is not known until the word '女の子' is processed.
Therefore, it is assumed that the processing load will increase accordingly.


(108) 太は, [いつも側に座る] A woman's child is white.

Finally, I would like to consider the acquisition of modifier clauses from the perspective of language processing.
Japanese modifier clauses are attributive clauses, and if we consider that there are no syntactic constraints between the modified noun and the modifier, it is predicted that the structure of the modifier will simply develop into a word phrase (sentence) from a processing perspective.

--- p.201

2.3.3 Negative evidence in first language acquisition
One of the reasons why recast has gained attention in SLA is the research trend in first language acquisition (FLA).
While the need for negation evidence—that is, information about what is not possible in the target language—is often debated in SLA, the question of whether negation evidence exists was first discussed in FLA.
Nativists, who believed that a universal grammar (UG) existed, believed that positive evidence was sufficient for acquisition.
A frequently cited study by Brown & Hanlon (1970) found that parents corrected the truth of their children's utterances, but not grammatical errors.
Additionally, even if parents correct the errors, it was believed that the errors would not be corrected no matter how many times they were corrected, because the child was only interested in whether the content was right or wrong (McNeil, 1966).
From a nativist perspective, the minimal amount of positive evidence that activates the language acquisition device is sufficient to automatically start the device and produce FLA. In SLA, researchers also take the strong position that learners can directly access UG, and in particular, hold the view that positive evidence alone is sufficient for syntactic acquisition (Schwartz, 1993, 1999).
There are also (etc.).

--- p.269

2.
An approach based on sociocultural theory
Vygotsky's school, which values ​​interaction from a different perspective than interactionists, based on the understanding that human cognition develops through interaction in society, established the sociocultural theory (Lantolf, 2000a, b), which had a great influence on the field of language learning.
In sociocultural theory, SLA is considered a process of learning new ways of thinking or interacting, and language is emphasized as a cognitive tool through which inner thoughts are expressed.
Therefore, in cases where L2 proficiency is low, the learner's use of L1 in L2 learning was viewed positively, and the role of private speech was also noted.
Private speech is like a quiet, personal whisper, and lacks any response from the other person speaking.
This approach believes that interaction cannot be understood solely through the characteristics of conversational coordination that the transactionalists claim represents the process of meaning confirmation.
It was believed that learners could develop their language skills to the upper limit of their zone of proximal development (ZPD), which is the limit of their current abilities and potential abilities brought out through the help of friends, by solving problems in a given task through interaction with friends who are more capable than them.

--- pp.322-323

4.2 Size of the classroom guidance effect
Koyanagi (2016) conducted a meta-analysis by selecting 14 domestic and international papers published from 1990 to July 2012.
Of the 14 studies, 11 were purely experimental designs (participants were randomly assigned to groups) and 3 were quasi-experimental designs (using existing classrooms).
Since there are studies that deal with multiple target language forms, and the teaching effect may appear differently depending on the nature of the language form (Dekeyser, 1995), the effect size was calculated for each language form.
Therefore, 17 studies were used to calculate the effect size.
When Norris & Ortega (2000) conducted a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of classroom instruction from 1980 to 1998, 49 papers were included, which is a limited number of papers compared to that.

--- p.338