| Instructors of Chinese and Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners tend to play down the students' past language instruction and group speakers of these two highly different languages together. With a particular view toward the intermediate level EFL learners' Interlanguage (IL) development, a one-year longitudinal study has been undertaken at two national universities located in regional capitals of China and Japan. The study focuses on various "marked" structures in the target language (TL or English) which are "unmarked" in the learners' native language (Mandarin or Japanese) and examines how these college-level learners make the adjustments necessary to make progress in the TL. The syntactic structures chosen (articles, participles, count and non-count nouns, quantifiers, etc.) have, via Contrastive Analysis, been ascertained to be of near-equal difficulty for the language groups concerned. Using a battery of tests (Translation, Multiple-choice and Cloze-type), repeated in weekly cycles over the course of one academic term, an "Interlanguage Profile" of written performance has been compiled. Consistent with reported mean scores on such standard tests as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), two groups of Mandarin-speaking Freshmen and Sophomores outperformed their Japanese-speaking counterparts on all tests administered. To account for this disparity in performance, the researcher has provided background information on the respective EFL contexts involved as well as reports on different student attitudes toward the TL. Of particular interest in this cross-linguistic study is how notably different levels of proficiency may result among groups of learners who are well-matched in terms of general background and motivational characteristics. In addition to noting how these particular groups of students performed on various tests, the possible benefits of using an IL Profile as a means of determining readiness for or placement into intermediate-to-advanced composition will also be discussed. It is hoped that in offering a combined, two-nation focus, this research can help to raise awareness regarding "Asian learners/Oriental languages" and provide a novel look at EFL learning in China and Japan. |
