Instruction focusing on ideas and opinions and the learning of linguistic forms

摘要

This study examines the characteristics of L2 learners’ usage of linguistic forms employed to express ideas and opinions to elicit pedagogical implications for an effective instruction for teaching learners to express themselves in the target language. Essays written by L2 learners were compared with those by native speakers. The L2 learners’ essays were written by Japanese university students in the author’ s essay writing course, while the essays written by native speakers were from the Corpus of English Essays Written by Native Speakers1). Another corpus called the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays2) was also used to support the findings of this study. The analyses of six target linguistic forms made the characteristics of the learners’ usage clear and presented useful implications for effective teaching.