2010 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

A conversation analytic study on L2 communicative competence necessary for various opinion-exchanging discussions

Research Project

Project/Area Number	21720187
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Japanese language education
Research Institution	Kansai University
Principal Investigator	IKEDA Keiko Kansai University, 国際部, 准教授 (90447847)
Project Period (FY)	2009 – 2010
Keywords	言語学習 / 会話分析 / コミュニケーション能力 / 話し合い
Research Abstract	In this project, I examined a particular social interactional context to "argue" and "discuss" with peers, and how L2 users of Japanese (and in comparison, L1 speakers of Japanese) would handle themselves in such a situation. These two groups which consisting of 3～4 people at one time engaged in a discussion for approximately 30 minutes each, for five times. The corpus of these discussions was analyzed using conversation analysis. Along with the main theme of this project, that is to investigate L2 speakers' performance in arguing and discussing, another related theme has come up. The project then investigated how one interactionally delivers his/her opinion to others, i.e., re-considering what has been understood as communicative competence in general. In order to do so, the study has examined additional data such as classroom interaction. Two journal articles were published during the period of research, and two more papers are planned to come out as a chapter in a volume in 2012 and 2013.