Vocabulary Range and Characteristics of Words Appearing in Elementary School English Textbooks in Japan

Abstract

　　Following the change in the Course of Study, the new curriculum for elementary schools begins from April 2020 and the English textbooks prepared according to the new curriculum are ready. This study aimed to investigate two things: (a) which words appeared in all the textbooks made by different publishers and (b) what the characteristics of these words were. The textbooks of seven publishers were analyzed and, like earlier studies, the results revealed that only a small percentage of the words were covered by all the textbooks. Moreover, about half of the unique word types appeared in only one of the textbooks. This study also found that a large number of concrete nouns, such as words related to colors, animals, and jobs, were included in all the textbooks. Additionally, the textbooks included more action verbs than static verbs and a large number of positive adjectives and adverbs. The word list provided by this research will prove useful to junior high school teachers for smoothly bridging elementary and junior high school English education.