68-6

8/104

Figure 5　Question 2: What do you think is the best response?Q2c: To an older person (Teacher)Figure 6　Question 2: What do you think is the best response?Q2d: To an unknown person (Salesclerk)RQ2: How are language learners seek clarification when facing different situations of mishearing?The most popular answers to Question 2 were “request to repeat” and “request to explain” in various situations of mishearing. Both can be classi-fied as instances of direct asking, which contrasts with indirect asking, such as attempts to under-stand utterances indirectly and checking for under-standing.” We initially hypothesized that attempts at indirect understanding would be the favored strategy. This assumption was promoted by Tsubaki3), who asserted that endeavors to under-stand utterances indirectly do not change the flow of Japanese conversations. We speculated that this idea is also applicable to English conversations. The results negated our hypothesis.Some of the Japanese participants could not ask for clarification in an indirect manner because English and Japanese are different languages. As the structure of English is different from that of Japanese, some Japanese learners’ insufficient language skills prevent them from asking for clari-fication in an indirect manner. The choices made by the Japanese non-native students and native English teachers were compared. 572does retrotransposon make up about 10% of the human genome?”, and one opted for “Sorry, could you please say that again?” as their responses. With regard to Question 2d, talking to an unknown person, two teachers opted for “Please repeat that.” as a strategy for seeking clarification, and two chose “So, you mean it’s a double point promotion?”. DiscussionRQ1: What are the main reasons for language learners’ failure to hear utterances?The findings related to Question 1 showed that failure among the respondents to hear and under-stand content was most frequently caused by limitations in vocabulary. These results support what Mizuta2) argued. According to Mizuta, a lack of vocabulary is one of the reasons why language learners mishear in their listening comprehension process. Speed was the most common cause of the participants’ to hear understandable sentences. These results point to the importance of being careful with these two aspects so that people can correctly hear utterances. failure