Grammatical orientation: fundamental language differences on learnability

Grammatical orientation: fundamental language differences on learnability

Toyota, Junichi

The world languages can be roughly divided into three types based on grammatical orientation, e.g. reality-oriented type (e.g. Russian, Chinese); speaker-oriented (e.g. Japanese, Serbian); hearer-oriented (e.g. English, Swedish). Differences borne out of grammatical orientations are hardly ever taken into consideration in making teaching materials. Each type has its peculiarities in grammatical system (e.g. reality-oriented languages have a description of situation as a basic unit, while speakeroriented languages consider speaker‘s experience as a base). Such differences can create fundamental differences in the language use in learners‘ L2, and this influence cannot be underestimated. In this paper, it is aimed to raise awareness of such differences and point out that crosslinguistic comparison can offer numerous points for improving L2 learning.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

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