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5 - Haiku and Spoken Language: Corpus-Driven Analyses of Linguistic Features in English Language Haiku Writing

from Part I - Literature and Spoken Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2019

By
Atsushi Iida
Edited by
Christian Jones
Christian Jones
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

This chapter reports on a poetic inquiry with English language learners in the Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university context. It focuses on the use of haiku – a Japanese poem containing seventeen syllables in a three-line 5–7–5 syllable pattern with the usage of a seasonal reference and a cutting word – and analyses features of spoken language in a corpus of English language haiku poetry written by Japanese second language (L2) learners. The chapter begins by reviewing previous studies of the use of haiku in L2 contexts. It then describes a quantitative, corpus-based study which involved the analysis of textual and linguistic features of English language haiku writing. The data, consisting of a total of 2,017 haiku poems written by 204 first-year engineering students at a Japanese public university, were submitted to statistical analyses. The results illustrate some specific features of English language haiku produced by Japanese L2 writers: haiku poetry is a short, descriptive text which presents each writer’s emotional reactions to his or her daily life, and it also includes such spoken language features as the twelve verbs most frequently used in spoken discourse (Biber and Conrad ), evaluative and emotive adjectives, contractions and vague language. This study suggests that the task of composing haiku in English can play an important role in L2 learning in terms of raising learners’ awareness of typical spoken forms in the target language.

Keywords

Corpus-analysiswritten languagespoken languagehaikulanguage awarenessfrequency
Type
Chapter
Information
Literature, Spoken Language and Speaking Skills in Second Language Learning , pp. 96 - 117
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

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