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Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

Dr. Frank E. Daulton

(2007)

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Book Details

Abstract

Throughout the world, the mother tongue fundamentally affects second language acquisition. Japanese contains thousands of loanwords, many based on the most useful types of English vocabulary. This book examines gairaigo -- Western loanwords in Japanese -- and its effect on L2 English acquisition. The first part introduces Japanese lexical borrowing. The second part resolves the “paradox of cognates” and clarifies the effect of gairaigo on English acquisition. The third part assesses the loanword cognates in Japanese that correspond to high-frequency and academic English. The fourth part focuses on barriers to utilizing this L1 resource. The epilogue presents general principles and suggestions for using gairaigo in teaching, and the appendix features useful lists of English/Japanese cognates. There are important pedagogic implications for wherever language contact has occurred.


Frank E. Daulton is an Associate Professor at Ryukoku University in Kyoto. Born in the United States, he has taught EFL in Japan for nearly two decades. His academic interests include vocabulary acquisition and language transfer. He holds degrees in Journalism (University of Missouri) and Education (Temple University). And in 2004, he completed his doctorate in Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington under vocabulary expert Paul Nation. He resides on the shore of Lake Biwa with his wife and three children.


This book is a valuable contribution to SLA research. Apart from the obvious target of the book, SLA researchers and teachers anywhere in the world, it will be of particular interest to the Japanese community and to Westerners interested in Japanese language and culture. It is not easy to write a book appealing to audiences as disparate as this, but Daulton has managed to do this very well. He writes clearly and lucidly and makes good use of his teaching experience in Japan.


Håkan Ringbom, Emeritus Professor of English, Åbo Akademi University

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Contents v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: The Importance of Cognates for EFL in Japan 1
Part 1 Japan’s Importation of English 7
Chapter 1 The Assimilation of English into Japanese – A Historical and Linguistic Overview 9
Chapter 2 Today’s Generation of Gairaigo 24
Part 2 Gairaigo and Language Acquisition 41
Chapter 3 Resolving the Paradox of Cognates 43
Chapter 4 The Effect of Loanwords in Japanese on the Learning of English 61
Part 3 The Built-in Lexicons 75
Chapter 5 Common Loanword Cognates for High-frequency and Academic English 77
Chapter 6 Quantifying the Overlap and Quality of Japanese/English Cognates 87
Part 4 Exploiting Japanese Loanword Cognates 99
Chapter 7 Barriers to Accessing Cognates 101
Chapter 8 Extending Word Knowledge Within Word Families 110
Epilogue: New Horizons 123
Appendix 1: The Standard Set of Katakana 131
Appendix 2: The List of Common Loanwords Corresponding to the BNC 3000 133
Appendix 3: Academic Borrowed Words 156
Appendix 4: The Similarity of 1K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords 164
Appendix 5: The Similarity of 2K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords 168
Appendix 6: The Similarity of 3K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords 171
References 173
Index 183