Learning Japanese as an Additional Language: A Case Study of One Learner's Experience

This dissertation, "Learning Japanese as an Additional Language: a Case Study of One Learner's Experience" by Siu-wai, Louisa, Chan, 陳小慧, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled Learning Japanese as an Additional Language: A Case Study of One Learner's Experience submitted by Louisa S. W. Chan for the degree of Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong September, 2003 This dissertation is a diary study by the author of her own experience of learning Japanese as an additional language in a variety of contexts, including self-study, formal instruction and informal interaction, in both Hong Kong (where Japanese is not normally used outside the classroom) and Japan (where Japanese is widely used outside the classroom) over a period of seven months, in light of the increasing popularity of learning Japanese among Hong Kong people and little research on the acquisition of Japanese as a second or foreign language. The study aims to identify the salient features in the learning experience with the hope of generating some suggestions for the learning of Japanese by Hong Kong people and the teaching of Japanese to Hong Kong people. It revealed that awareness of and reflection on one's learning needs and behavior, together with the appropriate use of language learning strategies (memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and social strategies) were conducive to success in learning. These strategies mainly include the use of mnemonics, focus on form or meaning to meet different task demands, deductive and inductive analysis of language, constantly monitoring and correcting oneself, learning vocabulary with reference to real objects or concepts, and language transfer. It was also found that the lexical similarities between Japanese and Cantonese and between Japanese and English greatly enhanced the author's ilearning of Japanese vocabulary. Lastly, formal instruction was found to be useful for learning language items consciously and systematically but proved to be inadequate for developing communicative competence and full acquisition, which largely stemmed from active use of the target language for communicative purposes in naturalistic contexts. Due to the lack of naturalistic input and naturalistic practice opportunities in Hong Kong, learning Japanese in Japan was found to be more effective than in Hong Kong. ii DOI: 10.5353/th_b2705606 Subjects: Japanese language - Study and teaching - China - Hong Kong Japanese language - Self-instruction Second language acquisition