An Investigation Into The Employment Of Homophones Of Japanese Students

Japanese and Chinese share a close relationship; even lots of words in Japanese are marked in similar or the same characters, which, in the view of researchers, are called Chinese-Japanese homographs (homographs in short). On the one hand, the existence of these homographs provides such a great convenience for language beginners that they might figure out the meaning of new words through existing knowledge of mother tongue. On the other hand, learners might take the words too literally that they would misuse words due to’incomplete comprehension. Therefore, vocabulary errors of Japanese students are distinguished from students in other countries, which is the result of homographs interference.This report divides homographs into four categories according to the relationship between Chinese and Japanese words, namely zero association between Chinese and Japanese words (Type-A homographs), cross association between Chinese and Japanese words (Type-B homographs), Japanese words entailing Chinese words (Type-C homographs) and Chinese word entailing Japanese words (Type-D homographs). Then226English composition corpuses of Japanese students in Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) is collected and some of the sentences which are semantically correct are taken out and categorised due to error types, then the error rates of the four type homographs shall be counted. Later, top-ten errors are marked and designed for test papers, which will be used to investigate the language level of Japanese students in BFSU. The test would examine the comprehension of homographs both in subjective writing and objective testing. Then an interview of the teacher is carried out to investigate how the errors are made, in order to provide feasible teaching suggestions of homograph teaching.Among the four type homographs, the proportion of Type-A homographs is49.51%, Type-B31.07%, Type-C19.42and there are no Type-D homographs. However, in the testing paper, Type-D homographs count most and Type-A, B and C followed. Such a result is caused by students not realising the difficulty of homographs, especially not comprending the exclusive semantic meaning of those words. Furthermore, this report analyses possible reasons of homographic errors in three aspects:the negative transfer of native language, the influence of learning strategy and the influence of learning environment. The interview of the teacher might serve as a further confirmation. Some teaching suggestions are raised in the end of the report, and feasibility shall be verified in the following practical experiences.