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    Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords
    Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords
    Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords
    Ebook334 pages6 hoursSecond Language Acquisition

    Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

    By Fernando J. Rosenberg

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    Throughout the world, the mother tongue fundamentally affects second language acquisition. Japanese contains thousands of loanwords, many based on the most useful types of English vocabulary. This book examines gairaigo -- Western loanwords in Japanese -- and its effect on L2 English acquisition. The first part introduces Japanese lexical borrowing. The second part resolves the “paradox of cognates” and clarifies the effect of gairaigo on English acquisition. The third part assesses the loanword cognates in Japanese that correspond to high-frequency and academic English. The fourth part focuses on barriers to utilizing this L1 resource. The epilogue presents general principles and suggestions for using gairaigo in teaching, and the appendix features useful lists of English/Japanese cognates. There are important pedagogic implications for wherever language contact has occurred.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMultilingual Matters
    Release dateDec 6, 2007
    ISBN9781788920544
    Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords
    Author

    Fernando J. Rosenberg

    Frank E. Daulton is an Associate Professor at Ryukoku University in Kyoto. Born in the United States, he has taught EFL in Japan for nearly two decades. His academic interests include vocabulary acquisition and language transfer. He holds degrees in Journalism (University of Missouri) and Education (Temple University). And in 2004, he completed his doctorate in Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington under vocabulary expert Paul Nation. He resides on the shore of Lake Biwa with his wife and three children.

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      Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords - Fernando J. Rosenberg

      SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

      Series Editor: Professor David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

      This series brings together titles dealing with a variety of aspects of language acquisition and processing in situations where a language or languages other than the native language is involved. Second language is thus interpreted in its broadest possible sense. The volumes included in the series all offer in their different ways, on the one hand, exposition and discussion of empirical findings and, on the other, some degree of theoretical reflection. In this latter connection, no particular theoretical stance is privileged in the series; nor is any relevant perspective – sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, etc. – deemed out of place. The intended readership of the series includes final-year undergraduates working on second language acquisition projects, postgraduate students involved in second language acquisition research, and researchers and teachers in general whose interests include a second language acquisition component.

      Other Books in the Series

      Focus on French as a Foreign Language: Multidisciplinary Approaches

      Jean-Marc Dewaele (ed.)

      Second Language Writing Systems

      Vivian Cook and Benedetta Bassetti (eds)

      Third Language Learners: Pragmatic Production and Awareness

      Maria Pilar Safont Jordà

      Artificial Intelligence in Second Language Learning: Raising Error Awareness

      Marina Dodigovic

      Studies of Fossilization in Second Language Acquisition

      ZhaoHong Han and Terence Odlin (eds)

      Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts

      Margaret A. DuFon and Eton Churchill (eds)

      Early Trilingualism: A Focus on Questions

      Julia D. Barnes

      Cross-linguistic Influences in the Second Language Lexicon

      Janusz Arabski (ed.)

      Motivation, Language Attitudes and Globalisation: A Hungarian Perspective

      Zoltán Dörnyei, Kata Csizér and Nóra Németh

      Age and the Rate of Foreign Language Learning

      Carmen Muñoz (ed.)

      Investigating Tasks in Formal Language Learning

      María del Pilar García Mayo (ed.)

      Input for Instructed L2 Learners: The Relevance of Relevance

      Anna Nizegorodcew

      Cross-linguistic Similarity in Foreign Language Learning

      Håkan Ringbom

      Second Language Lexical Processes

      Zsolt Lengyel and Judit Navracsics (eds)

      Third or Additional Language Acquisition

      Gessica De Angelis

      Understanding Second Language Process

      ZhaoHong Han (ed.)

      For more details of these or any other of our publications, please contact: Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, England http://www.multilingual-matters.com

      SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 26

      Series Editor: David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

      Japan’s Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

      Frank E. Daulton

      MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD

      Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto

      Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

      Daulton, Frank E.

      Japan’s Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords / Frank E. Daulton.

      Second Language Acquisition: 26

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      1. Japanese language–Foreign words and phrases–English.

      2. English language–Study and teaching–Japan. I. Title.

      PL664.E5D38 2008

      495.6’2421–dc22                          2007029788

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-030-2 (hbk)

      eISBN 9781788920544

      Multilingual Matters Ltd

      UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH.

      USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA.

      Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada.

      Copyright © 2008 Frank E. Daulton.

      All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

      The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned.

      Typeset by Datapage International Ltd.

      Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Ltd.

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction: The Importance of Cognates for EFL in Japan

      Part 1: Japan’s Importation of English

      1The Assimilation of English into Japanese – A Historical and Linguistic Overview

      2Today’s Generation of Gairaigo

      Part 2: Gairaigo and Language Acquisition

      3Resolving the Paradox of Cognates

      4The Effect of Loanwords in Japanese on the Learning of English

      Part 3: The Built-in Lexicons

      5Common Loanword Cognates for High-frequency and Academic English

      6Quantifying the Overlap and Quality of Japanese/English Cognates

      Part 4: Exploiting Japanese Loanword Cognates

      7Barriers to Accessing Cognates

      8Extending Word Knowledge Within Word Families

      Epilogue – New Horizons

      Appendix 1. The Standard Set of Katakana

      Appendix 2. The List of Common Loanwords Corresponding to the BNC 3000

      Appendix 3. Academic Borrowed Words

      Appendix 4. The Similarity of 1K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords

      Appendix 5. The Similarity of 2K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords

      Appendix 6. The Similarity of 3K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords

      References

      Index

      Acknowledgements

      Thanks to Håkan Ringbom for providing supportive comments throughout the preparation of this book. Sections have been read and commented on by John Crosetto, Tyrone Daulton, Susan Krashinsky, Mayumi Okamoto, Linh Pallos, Paul Stapleton, Jeannet Stephen, Meredith Stephens and Emi Uchida; I am very grateful for all this help.

      Ryukoku University has provided support for this publication.

      This book is dedicated to my parents, who loved books.

      A note on scripts:

      English vocabulary items will appear in the Roman alphabet underlined (e.g. word). Japanese loanwords will appear in the Roman alphabet underlined and italicised (waado), using a modified Hepburn Romanisation; occasionally loanwords will appear in their katakana forms (e.g. ).

      Introduction: The Importance of Cognates for EFL in Japan

      Sometimes worlds are linked by words. English night, for example, is related to nuit (French), Nacht (German), nacht (Dutch), nicht (Scots), nat (Danish), noc (Czech, Polish), noch (Russian), noc (Serbian), nox (Latin), nakti- (Sanskrit), natë (Albanian), noche (Spanish), nos (Welsh), noite (Portuguese), notte (Italian), nit (Catalan), noapte (Romanian), nótt (Icelandic) and naktis (Lithuanian), all deriving from Proto-Indo-European nekwt-. Moreover, as a result of the Norman Conquest and other historical events, French and Latin have strongly influenced English, leading to cognates such as promenade and focus. English, in turn, has spread across the globe and is spoken by some two billion people.

      Native English speakers are greatly helped in learning related languages because of this web of linguistic connections.

      In contrast to English, the Japanese language developed in relative isolation. Japanese belongs to the Japonic language family, which is shared only by the Ryukyuan languages spoken around Okinawa. When the Japanese needed a writing system and to enhance their lexicon, they borrowed from their immediate neighbours, China and Korea. Japanese is essentially spoken only in its homeland, and being fluent in Japanese requires mastery of a complex system of honorifics that reflect the hierarchy of Japanese society. In many aspects, English and Japanese are completely dissimilar languages; we say potato, the Japanese say jagaimo; we say tomato, the Japanese say tomato ( ) …

      In fact, while Japanese phonology, syntax, pragmatics and discourse have remained relatively impervious to outside influence, a distant and exotic language – English – has extensively and fundamentally transformed the Japanese lexicon. Through the activities of certain Japanese individuals, a flood of English words have been ‘borrowed’ to become gairaigo ( ) – Western loanwords in Japanese. Even English-based poteto (potato) has arrived as an alternative to Japanese jagaimo. The scale of Japan’s borrowing of English is virtually unparalleled in the world.

      However, Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) has largely neglected this potential resource, and research on loanword cognates has languished; this is unfortunate, in light of the arguably dismal state of English education in Japan.

      The State of English Education in Japan

      The late Edwin O. Reischauer, renowned US ambassador to Japan, satirically listed Japan’s miserable performance in English as one of the Seven Wonders of the World (Honna, 1995). Despite the vast resources devoted to English education, and the vast amount of English circulating in forms ranging from billboards to everyday loanwords, Japan is among the world’s monolingual societies where English-speaking visitors have great difficulty communicating.

      For more than 100 years, there has been formal English education in Japan – with most Japanese people today having studied it for at least six years. Ninety-nine percent of the Japanese study English for three years at middle school, and about 92% for a further three years at high school (Morrow, 1987). The average Japanese person has had at least 3120 hours of English instruction (Honna, 1995); more if they attended college.

      However, Japanese EFL is characterised by not only its dependence on grammar-translation and focus on entrance exams, but by large classes of taciturn students. Sociocultural factors such as self-efficacy, fear of failure, anxiety and intolerance of mistakes afflict learners. Language learners without the confidence to produce require much greater time to achieve any measure of fluency, as they are not actively engaged in theory testing, and have limited reception and production opportunities (Ringbom, 1987). Indeed, Japanese learners lack what Ngeow (1998) calls a ‘positive disposition towards learning’, which should include: high motivation; risk-taking attitudes; mindfulness or attentiveness; and a sense of responsibility for learning.

      Even the linguistic circumstances work against English education, and most Japanese consider English to be very distant and not useful in daily life.

      First, Japan is not a society in which English plays a meaningful role as a language of international communication. The lack of opportunity to use it weakens the motivations of learners to acquire a working command of English. This is true in many places other than Japan. (Honna, 1995: 57)

      Indeed, the situation of Finnish EFL used to be quite similar (Ringbom, 1987); learners in such situations spend only a very limited time on learning.

      The results of Japan’s universal English education system are poor indeed. Loveday (1996: 153) describes the Japanese public as ‘basilectal’; ‘distant non-bilingual’ (p. 95); and having ‘a low, pidgin-like level covering only the most basic of needs’ (p. 99). Almost no graduate can communicate with foreigners beyond a few formulaic expressions. Not surprisingly, Japan ranks near the bottom of nations in TOEFL scores (Bronner, 2000), and English is one of the most unpopular subjects among students (Loveday, 1996).

      The Potential of Cognates in Japanese EFL

      Most researchers believe communicative competence is heavily based on the lexicon. Vocabulary acquisition was once the neglected area of language study, but this tendency has been replaced by a growing awareness that a solid vocabulary is necessary in every stage of learning.

      Vocabulary knowledge enables language use, language use enables the increase of vocabulary knowledge, knowledge of the world enables the increase of vocabulary knowledge and language use and so on. (Nation & Waring, 1997: 7)

      Not surprisingly, vocabulary ability correlates positively with overall linguistic ability (e.g. Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Read, 2000). Numerous studies confirm the crucial role of vocabulary in both L1 (e.g. Carroll, 1972) and L2 acquisition (Coady & Huckin, 1997; Huckin et al., 1993; Schmitt & McCarthy, 1997; Schreuder & Weltens, 1993).

      Japan’s English education system encourages learners to memorise complex and obscure grammar rules, but fails to provide the massive vocabulary expansion, passive and active, needed to attain communicative competence.

      It is a maxim that without grammar, very little can be communicated, but without vocabulary, nothing can. For instance, if someone were to ask you on the street, ‘Telephone box, where?’, you could guess what he or she means, whereas if the questioner does not know the expression ‘telephone box’, nothing beyond gestures can be communicated; fortunately, almost any Japanese tourist knows ‘telephone box’, as it exists in Japanese as a cognate (Uchida, 2001a).

      Throughout the world, learners’ L1 (first language) can be their most important asset in acquiring a second language. This is, for instance, the case for Korean learners of English, despite their preconception that English is very difficult.

      The effort of vocabulary learning is necessary to achieve a certain result desired by the learner, and the learner may be encouraged by seeing how fast he can go. The learner is interested primarily in accomplishment. He is interested in effort only in so far as it is conducive to the accomplishment which he desires. In particular, with cognates, it is easy for him to recognize the form and meaning of vocabulary items and to produce such sentences as he would like to express. (Lee, 1958: 57 – 58)

      English words in Korean are called Oi-rae-eo, which, like Japanese gairaigo, means literally ‘words coming from abroad’. There are numerous other parallels to English borrowing in Japan, including: transliteration; phonological transformation; and that loanwords have reached almost every aspect of Korean life. It is noteworthy that most English loanwords in Korean, e.g. kola (cola), kopi (coffee), plaet-fom (platform), cham-pu (shampoo), ais-krim (ice cream), taeksi (taxi), wiski (whiskey), nait-klop (nightclub) and koktel pati (cocktail party), also exist in Japan’s more extensive loanword lexicon.

      For a start, similarities between native language and target language vocabulary can reduce the time needed to develop good reading comprehension (e.g. Odlin, 1989), and enhance motivation and confidence (e.g. Ngeow, 1998; Pea, 1988), both of which are crucial for continued learning.

      Most students of English in Japan are at a relatively low level in their studies. For such learners, intralingual cues are unavailable, as they lack target language knowledge concerning phonology, orthography, morphology and syntax (Palmberg, 1987). Contextual cues are likewise problematic as such interpretations are biased by sociocultural perceptions. Fortunately, Japanese can draw upon their previous language knowledge, particularly the phonological and orthographic correspondences that arise through borrowing.

      Because of the vast number of English words that have been borrowed, the Japanese have access to countless potential cognates, which include high-frequency and academic words. English loanwords in Japanese are a built-in lexicon of English words learners have yet to encounter. Unfortunately, the role of L1 in L2 acquisition has been actively neglected in Japan.

      An Investigation

      When two distant fields of research are linked, often remarkable possibilities are revealed. Such an important link pertains for Japanese individuals learning English. On the one hand, much has been written about the importance of certain types of English vocabulary, such as high-frequency and academic words. On the other hand, there are an enormous number of English-based loanwords in Japanese. What if the Japanese are already familiar with many of the most important words of English, due to the English-based vocabulary stored in the Japanese lexicon as gairaigo?

      This book is divided into four parts. The first part will introduce the borrowing of English into Japanese and the modern generation of gairaigo. The second part will attempt to resolve the ‘paradox of cognates’ and clarify the effect of loanwords in Japanese on the learning of English. The third part will examine the common loanwords in Japanese that are based on high-frequency and academic English, and attempt to assess the quality of these cognates. The fourth part will focus on the barriers to Japanese learners of English in utilising their L1 resource, particularly their ability to extend borrowed word knowledge within English word families. The epilogue presents some general principles and concrete suggestions about how to make use of gairaigo in teaching.

      Japan offers a prime example of lexical borrowing, which relates to the important phenomenon of language transfer (in second and foreign language learning). Many of the characteristics of lexical borrowing in Japan, and its effects on L2 learning, can be found elsewhere in the world; inquiries regarding my research on Japanese loanword cognates have included those from English teachers in Malaysia and Rwanda. Swahili, for instance, has imported a substantial number of high-frequency loanwords from English, mainly key concepts in modern society such as hospitali (hospital), sukari (sugar) and tikiti (ticket) (Ringbom, 2007). Moreover, because of the wide influence of English vocabulary throughout the world, a Tanzanian learning Finnish, for instance, will be aided by the

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