Challenges and Pedagogical Implications in Teaching the Japanese Spatial Expression “no ue” to English-speaking Learners: A Corpus-based Study Using I-JAS

This study addresses the insufficient attention paid to the Japanese spatial expression “no ue” in research on English-speaking learners, even though spatial particles and locative nouns have been widely studied in second language acquisition. It investigates the use and misuse of “no ue” with the goal of identifying pedagogical challenges and proposing instructional improvements. Using the International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language (I-JAS) developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, 49 examples of learner production—including both spoken and written data—containing “no ue” were extracted via the “Chunagon” search system. Among these, 21 instances were identified as erroneous, all of which were categorized into six error types; 19 representative cases are illustrated and discussed in detail based on lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. The results revealed frequent errors related to unnatural placement expressions, structural confusion, and semantic mismatches with the English preposition “on”. These errors stemmed from a combination of factors, including spatial concept misinterpretation, vocabulary misuse, syntactic misunderstanding, and first-language interference. By systematically analyzing these tendencies, this study not only contributes to existing research but also highlights its novelty by directly linking error patterns with pedagogical implications, such as improving the teaching of spatial nouns and particles, emphasizing contextual meaning, and incorporating contrastive approaches with English.