The Study On Wago Verb Acquisition Among Undergraduate Students Majoring In The Japanese Language

It is obvious that vocabulary learning plays a very important role in foreign language learning.Nonetheless,in the range of Japanese language education,few learning activities which only focus on vocabulary are hardly held in priority.As a result,learners prefer to learning vocabulary based on the reading parts in textbooks,in which vocabulary learning comes to be secondary instead of a main part.In the comprehension-oriented learning activities above,influenced by the native language,Chinese learners tend to neglect Original Japanese(Wago)vocabulary.As a Chinese learner of Japanese I have the same problem as well,unconsciously using Kanji words in writing and daily communication,which may be not idiomatic.Based on the reality,many studies have shown the abuse of Kanji words among Chinese learners,where appears the absence of using the Wago verbs as well;meanwhile,it causes a negative impact on the acquisition of authentic Japanese.However,as far as I have searched for in advance,few studies on the acquisition of Wago and Wago verbs by Chinese learners of Japanese have already done.What's more,as for the acquisition,comprehension and using proficiency have proved to be two perspectives,which I intend to conducted from in my experiment.Therefore,based on the researches before,Wago verbs were divided into 3 groups(given as the same Chinese characters,given as different Chinese characters,and given as Hiragana);meanwhile,targeted at 68 undergraduate Chinese students majoring in Japanese,this study aims to analyze the acquisition of the Wago verbs according to the connection between the types of the Wago verbs and Japanese language proficiency.The results are as follows.(1)In terms of output,the Wago verbs with the same Chinese characters and the Wago verbs given as Hiragana were better than that in the Wago verbs with different Chinese characters,while there was no apparent difference between the Wago verbs with the same Chinese characters and the Wago verbs given as Hiragana.Moreover,upper intermediates performed better than lower intermediates under all circumstances.(2)In terms of comprehension,referring to the Wago verbs given as Chinese characters(both the same and different Chinese characters),the uppers and the lowers were on the same level.Furthermore,differing from the result concluded from the research before,in my experiment,it was found that the lowers do worse in the comprehension of the Wago verbs given as Hiragana.(3)Regardless of the types of verbs and the degrees of proficiency,the scores on the comprehension test were better than those on the output test.Also,few verbs reached high correct rates in both comprehension and output tests.According to the results above,it can be concluded that regarding to the acquisition of Japanese verbs,few verbs can be both understood and used well for undergraduate students majoring in the Japanese.Besides,Kanji knowledge,Japanese language knowledge(transitive/ intransitive verb,postpositional particles),Japanese language proficiency,and learning strategy(learning as chunks)were found to influence a lot on the Wago verb acquisition.In term of the research above,considering the authentic Japanese,it proves to be quite significant to focus on vocabulary in the learning and teaching activities.In a word,the learning of Wago verbs plays an irreplaceable part in the Japanese study,which is suggested to achieving in a manner of chunks as opposed to the traditional single-word study.