Learning the Narrative Characteristic: Perspective Taking in Written Japanese as a Foreign Language

Narratives written by L2 learners are often awkward even after linguistic elements such as grammatical errors and vocabulary choices are corrected. This unnaturalness may be caused by not exploiting the appropriate cultural and language specific aspects in the target language. The current study focuses on a narrative characteristic of Japanese; perspective taking consistency in writing a story, and the uses of its associated structures. By examining intermediate L2 learners of Japanese whose L1 is English, this study seeks to prove whether classroom instruction helps to overcome unnaturalness caused by the inappropriate uses of perspective taking and not using its associated structures in the short- and long terms. The results of this study show that instruction helps L2 learners to maintain the consistent perspective both in the short- and long-terms. However, the instruction seems to have not affected the L2 learners’ utilization of a variety of perspective taking structures. Taken together, this study offers implications for earlier instruction on the learning of the narrative characteristic.