著者

臼倉 美里 Misato Usukura

雑誌

學苑 = GAKUEN (ISSN:13480103)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.834, pp.15-27, 2010-04-01

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This study investigated the necessity of learners' explicit knowledge about the usage of English personal pronouns in anaphora comprehension. English and Japanese anaphora expressions by personal pronouns have some different features in their usages. It is assumed that Japanese learners would have difficulty understanding English anaphora expressions by personal pronouns due to the interlingual differences. It is believed among quite a few Japanese English teachers that these differences may have negative influence on their students' reading comprehension, and quite a lot of time has been spent on explicit explanation about them. The effectiveness of such explicit knowledge, however, has not been investigated enough. The present study examined whether Japanese EFL(English as a foreign language)learners need explicit knowledge about the usages of English personal pronouns to understand anaphora expressions. Also, if learners are able to comprehend English anaphora expressions without any explicit knowledge, what component of English ability complements the absence of knowledge? In the present study, the degree of automaticity in sentence processing is considered to be one of the possible factors and an investigation was carried out. The result indicated that learners were able to comprehend English anaphora expressions without explicit knowledge, but the relevance of sentence processing automaticity was not proven.