Chapter 6: The Form-Meaning Interface:A Study of Japanese-As-A-Foreign-Language Writing

Two studies are reported here to examine the issue of form-meaning relationships in the context of foreign language writing from an educational perspective. One of them, a case study of an intermediate Japanese proficient learner, describes how he approaches composition writing in the target language and, in particular, how much attention he is willing or able to pay to ideational thinking. The other study shifts the focus to composition readers evaluating two versions of the same Japanese compositions, one version exactly as written by Japanese learners and the other with grammatical errors corrected. These two studies led to the propositions that foreign language writers are capable of focusing on the more abstract levels of meaning or semantic integrity of text despite their language deficiencies and that the two general subscales of content and language use of foreign language texts can be discriminated without being unduly affected by surface-level, morphosyntactic errors.