Innovation in Language Learning

This paper has proved that unmarked English adjectives are more advantageous than marked ones among Japanese pre-school children in their comprehension and retention, before creating questions on the simultaneous evaluation system for Japanese children in public elementary school class. This test is necessary for the system reliability. Six contrastive adjectives are selected for Group A of Japanese 3-to-4-year-old children (n=37) and Group B of 4-to-5-year-old children (n=57) such as “big,” “long” and “clean” as unmarked after taking the pretest. Two posttests are held after learning contrastive adjectives in class; one is held right after the class, and the other is 24-hours later. According to the exact probability test, the possibility of “big/small” shows “P<.01” for Group A and “P<.08” for Group B: the one of “long/short” does “P<.16” for Group A and “P<.01” for Group B: the other of “clean/dirty” indicates “P<.09” for Group A and “P<.0004” for Group B on the right-after-class posttest. On the 24-hours-later posttest, the possibility of “big/small” shows “P<.14” for Group A and “P<.07” for Group B: the one of “long/short” does “P<.24” for Group A and “P<.02” for Group B: the other of “clean/dirty” indicates “P<.03” for Group A and “P<.0003” for Group B. These results display that learning in class is effective for Group A and B, and the unmarked adjectives are more advantageous for both groups than the marked ones in their comprehension and retention. Moreover, the results of abstract adjective terms such as “clean/dirty” are more significant than the ones of concrete adjective terms. Therefore, these unmarked/marked questions become the ones on our simultaneous evaluation system in class, to calculate English abilities of each young Japanese English learner. *This research has been supported with the “Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research” (KAKENHI) (17K02959) of “Japan Society for the Promotion of Science” (JSPS).

Keywords: Computer Evaluation, Marked and Unmarked Adjectives, public elementary schools in Japan;