Elizabeth Thomson

School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong

The System of Theme in Japanese: implications for teaching grammar and literacy in the Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) classroom

The central research task of my doctoral thesis was to describe in SF terms the system of Theme in Japanese. The corpus consisted of nine written texts from five different genres totally over 1000 clauses.

This paper will describe the system of Theme as it was reveal in the corpus. It will include descriptions of single and multiple Themes; implicit and explicit Themes and marked and unmarked Themes. It will further demonstrate how these different Themes organise collectively as different methods of development which correlate with different genres and with the different generic stages within discrete genres.

This paper will then discuss the implication of these descriptions for teaching literacy and grammar in the JFL classroom. The discussion will centre around the following questions:

  • Should reading and writing be taught according to genres?

  • Should the grammar of specific stages within a genre be made explicit?

  • Should patterns of thematic progression be included as part of the grammar class?

  • How do we begin to develop effective learning/teaching materials in the absence of substantial research into the genres of Japanese?