Twenty-eighth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

This paper presents part of the results of a learner corpus study of the syntactic acquisition of English as a second language (L2) by Japanese and Chinese native speakers. Learner corpus research with different first language (L1) backgrounds would enable immediate crosslinguistic triangulations and greater generalizability of findings regarding interlanguage systems. In this study, two cross-sectional English L2 corpora are used in order to investigate the acquisition of English syntax by L2 learners. While one of the learner corpora consists of 946 files of Japanese L1-English L2 spoken and written narratives by 473 Japanese L1 speakers, the other corpus contains speech production by Japanese L1 and Chinese L1 speakers who performed various speaking tasks. For the present study, the English oral and written narratives by 88 Japanese L1 speakers as well as the oral picture description tasks by 22 Japanese L1 and 30 Chinese L1 speakers were examined based on Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998, Bettoni & Di Biase, 2015). Results show that different data-collection tasks did not affect the developmental sequence as predicted in PT and that all the informants followed the developmental sequence regardless of language background. This study contributes to the further understanding of systematic and variable aspects in L2 acquisition. It also suggests that different L2 learner corpora could be used to investigate the crucial effects of language background on L2 learning.