Instructor Lexical Analyses of English Activities and English Language as a Subject in Japanese Elementary Schools

Abstract

　　This exploratory case study gives a report on lexical distribution analyses of Japanese elementary school instructors in English classes. The study attempts to provide one possible application to make use of a compiled English classroom spoken corpus. The spoken corpus includes transcripts from 16 English classes in 3 different elementary schools, where English is taught either as a foreign language activity or as one of the school subjects in the regular curriculum. Three exclusive sub-corpora were separated from the spoken corpus; Corpus A, consisting of 4 homeroom teachers and 1 assistant language teacher (ALT) at a public elementary school, Corpus B, composed of 3 homeroom teachers at an attached elementary school to a national university of education, and Corpus C, containing 3 homeroom teachers, 1 ALT, and 2 English-speaking Japanese language assistants at another attached elementary school. The total lexemes in the subcorpora amounted to 732 types and 15,100 tokens. Benchmarking the word types appearing in the sub-corpora on the General Service List of 2,000 basic English words and the words in Hi, friends!, English language materials principally used in elementary schools in Japan, revealed the existence of basic word usage of the instructors. It also revealed the unique word types depending on the varying school types and grades not to mention varying lesson materials and topics.