Teachers' and Nonteachers' Perception of Elementary Learners' Spoken Japanese

Abstract

Teachers need to be professionals in evaluating learners' linguistic skills, but they also need to be aware of how linguistically naive native speakers perceive learners' performance outside the classroom. This study, therefore, compares 39 native teachers' and 41 native nonteachers' perception of four elementary learners' spoken Japanese. In order to observe learners' performance in a contextualised situation, interviews between a native speaker and a learner were audiotaped and the 80 natives evaluated them according to six criteria: grammar, fluency, appropriateness, vocabulary, comprehensibility, and pronunciation. A questionnaire was also administered to understand the criteria most important in evaluating learners' language and the criteria for distinguishing good from poor language learners. The results suggest that teachers tend be more critical than nonteachers. Comprehensibility seems to be the most important criterion for evaluating learners' language, while the results showed that fluency and grammar discriminated good from poor language learners best.