Exploring the development of grammatical competence of EFL learners and developing the methodology for it applying Item Response Theory

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The present research aims to explore the development of overall grammatical competence of Japanese EFL learners. First, we reanalyzed the data on unaccusative and unergative verbs obtained in our previous studies in terms of variation. We obtained different results from what Sorace's influential model of variation did not predict. Second, we created a new grammaticality judgment task on English articles, and administered it to Japanese EFL learners. The results showed that learners' grammaticality judgments correlated with types of processing strategies they used. Third, we administered grammaticality judgment tasks (unaccusative/unergative verbs and relative clauses) to Japanese and Korean EFL learners, and found that although the overall performance of Korean learners was better than that of Japanese, the characteristics of the results were similar to great degree. Last, we made a first attempt to apply Neural Test Network to SLA research in order to overcome the shortcomings of some of the statistical methods used in our previous studies. The results indicated that four distinct stages of development were involved in the acquisition of unaccusative/unergative verbs by Japanese EFL learners.