A number of studies have reported that Japanese language, compared to English, has more of a tendency to construe situations as thematic relations and use intransitive verbs. Despite this linguistic predisposition, Japanese learners of English tend to judge natural sentences with intransitive verbs in English as ungrammatical and instead use unnatural passive constructions. One of the reasons for this can be uneven distributions of syntactic structures in textbooks, which is one of the main resources of English that learners are exposed to. This current research analyzed the syntactic structures in textbooks for a high school course called Eigo Hyogen [English Expressions]. The results found that despite the Japanese language having a tendency to prefer an intransitive construction to refer to an externally-driven thematic relation, such cases rarely appeared in the textbooks analyzed. In the rare occasions that they did appear, it was likely to be depicted in a passive construction. By alleviating this bias and presenting more English sentences that conform to the way native speakers of Japanese habitually describe situations, we believe that Japanese native speakers will be able to learn and use English with better efficacy.
