The Acquisition of the Discourse Marker oh by Japanese Learners of English : A Comparison of Leaners' Discourse Before and After Study Abroad

This study investigates the influence of studying abroad on the acquisition of the English discourse marker oh by comparative before-and-after evaluation. Participants included 27 female Japanese university students enrolled into a six-week summer abroad program. Before and after the program, each student had a 20-minute dyad with a native speaker of English. A set of dyads between native speakers taken from the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English was also analyzed as a benchmark. The results suggest that the students made substantial progress after studying abroad with respect to the frequency, position, and function of oh used in conversation. Before studying abroad, the students were considered to overuse oh ; the majority of instances of use were free-standing (i.e., constructing a turn without any other element) and functioned almost exclusively as a backchannel or filler. The "after" data revealed that (i) the frequency of oh declined ; (ii) turn-initial oh's significantly outnumbered free-standing ones ; and (iii) oh brought about a vividness to students' story telling by appearing in direct quotations, a nd also organized global structures of conversation by signaling topic shifts. The abovementioned results suggest that after studying abroad, the students achieved a more native-speaker-like usage of oh