Exploring the Sources of Communication Breakdown : Native Speaker Reactions to the Errors Produced by Japanese Learners of English

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The present study investigated the relative gravity of L2 errors made by Japanese learners of English in communicative contexts. In Experiment 1, an effort was invested in examining the relative gravity of phonological, lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic errors manifested in the request and apology situations. Experiment 2 was set up to take a closer look at the relative gravity of errors in three pragmatic strategies (speech acts, gambits, and discourse strategies) performed by the learners in the request situations. In both experiments, an attempt was further made to examine the influence of differential degrees of native respondents' exposure to Japanese English.From the role-play dialogs between Japanese EFL learners and a native English speaker, two request and two apology dialogs were selected, which contained the errors in the four linguistic domains. These errors had been validated by two English-speaking linguists as those inducing serious communication breakdown. The subjects … More were 69 native-English-speaking college students in the U.S., who were further divided into two groups in terms of the degree of exposure to Japanese English. They were requested to listen to the tape while reading the role-play transcripts and to rate the seriousness in communication problems inherent in the designated erroneous expressions.The results indicated that the judgments of communicative effects were context-dependent and were paiticularly influenced by the types of speech acts. In the request situations, inappropriate request realization patterns and phonological deviations were judged to impede communication to the greater extent. In apology situations, however, lexico-grammatical errors were more likely to induce cominunication breakdown. It was also found that degrees of native speakers' exposure to Japanese English did not influence their judgments of communicative effects. On the whole, error gravity tended to be governed by the functions of the words, phrases, and sentences containing the errors in the whole discourse. Less