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Part of
Processability and Language Acquisition in the Asia-Pacific Region
Edited by Satomi Kawaguchi, Bruno Di Biase and Yumiko Yamaguchi
[Processability Approaches to Language Acquisition Research & Teaching 9] 2023
► pp. 144–162

Chapter 6
Japanese L2 corpora and SLA research

| National Institute for Japanese Language (NINJAL) | Hiroshima University
| Western Sydney University
This chapter overviews learner corpora and corpus-based acquisition studies in Japanese to illustrate the advantages of using them in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. It introduces learners’ oral and written production corpora, including I-JAS, the largest Japanese learner corpora in the world. Through separate studies, including one PT-based study, we illustrate how corpora can be utilised to obtain results beyond what can usually be achieved with small-scale studies, which contributes toward overcoming the recurring limitations of current SLA research. Analysing learner corpora enables immediate crosslinguistic triangulations and greater generalisability of findings regarding interlanguage systems. Corpora-based studies allow SLA researchers to consider new perspectives and areas that have to this day been underexplored because of the paucity of data or lack of typological spread and comparability.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Learner corpora
  • 3.Japanese learner corpora
  • 4.Corpus-based acquisition studies in Japanese
    • 4.1Longitudinal learner corpus, C-JAS, on Japanese demonstratives
    • 4.2I-JAS: Large-scale learner corpus of Japanese L2 with typological spread of L1
    • 4.3Japanese L2 corpus-based studies within Processability Theory
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 2 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/palart.9.06sak
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