2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

The development of syntactic knowledge in Japanese EFL elementary school students: A longitudinal study using elicited imitation tasks.

Research Project

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Project/Area Number	19K00811
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Section	一般
Review Section	Basic Section 02100:Foreign language education-related
Research Institution	Ritsumeikan University (2023) College of Nagoya Women's University (2020-2022) Aichi University of Technology (2019)
Principal Investigator	Eguchi Akiko 立命館大学, 文学部, 教授 (30758602)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	村尾玲美名古屋大学, 人文学研究科, 准教授 (80454122)
Project Period (FY)	2019-04-01 – 2024-03-31
Keywords	小学校英語 / 文構造の知識 / 模倣発話タスク / 音韻的作動記憶 / 定型パターン / 語彙サイズ / 英語スピーキングタスク / パフォーマンス評価
Outline of Final Research Achievements	With the introduction of foreign language (English) as a formal subject for Grades 5 and 6 students in Japan, acquiring language knowledge and skills such as English sentence structure and vocabulary has become one of the goals. This study proposed an Elicited Imitation Task as a method to measure young learners’ knowledge of sentence structure. The study also longitudinally investigated the development from Grades 4 to 5 (Group A) and from Grades 5 to 6 (Group B), yielding the following main findings. First, elementary school students perform imitation utterances based on their knowledge of vocabulary and the linear order of words rather than syntactic knowledge. Second, performance on the imitation task can measure the integration of grammatical knowledge and vocabulary knowledge while controlling for the influence of working memory. Third, grammatical knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and imitation performance slowly but steadily improved in classroom foreign language learning.
Free Research Field	外国語教育
Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements	2020年度より小学校高学年で教科としての外国語(英語)が新設され、社会的にも英語教育の領域においても関心が高まっているが、言語習得の観点からの実証研究は少なく、とりわけ小学生が持つ文法知識に関する研究は文法性判断課題を用いた限定的なものであった。本研究で提案する模倣発話タスクは、文中における具体的な箇所の成否が明確になるため詳細な分析が可能であり、教育実践への応用も期待できる。また、本研究で明らかにした、小学生の文構造や語彙に関する知識に関する実証研究の結果は、より円滑で効率の良い小中接続を検討するうえでの基礎的データとなる。