Ambiguous Expressions in Communicative Events by Japanese Teachers of English

概要

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Japanese EFL students often have difficulties improving English reading skills. A major reason for that might come from the different paragraph writing conventions on which both languages are based. When writing an essay, English speakers tend to start a paragraph with a general idea and then provide supporting examples of the idea. This paragraph pattern is often called general-to-specific structure. On the other hand, Japanese speakers like to start with specific examples at the beginning, as if such examples were a prelude to main points, and then try to guide reader's attention gradually to the core points at the end of the paragraph. This pattern is named specific-to-general structure. The same different structures are also found in the sentence level. This may be because each language behaves on its own convention in any portion of the language. If such languagespecific conventions are taught to Japanese EFL learners in a systematic way, it will help them not only improve their reading skills but also eventually find pleasure in reading English. In this paper I will present two different language behaviors first in the paragraph level and then in the sentence level, by discussing various examples. I would like to keep collecting self-explanatory examples and prepare good explanations for EFL students.
2001-12-31