2022 Volume 16 Pages 145-159
A test was developed to measure students’ comprehension of Japanese Common Academic Words (Matsushita, 2011a), which are specific to academic texts regardless of the fields of specialization, and was given to 4,022 students. These students were from the 4th to 6th grade of elementary school, from the 1st to 3rd grade of junior high school, and at the undergraduate level of university. Comprehension increased as the academic year advanced, but the standard deviation at each year exceeded the average differences from the adjacent years at all years, suggesting large individual differences within the same year. This difference continued to the university, and this study confirmed that some university students’ understanding remained at the same level as that of elementary or junior high school students. In addition, there were differences between universities: at one university, students had a wide variety of comprehension levels; at another, students had consistently high comprehension levels. The vocabulary with low understanding in university students fell in the following three categories: 1) words that are normally considered to be basic and of high-frequency and its accurate understanding was left unchecked, 2) highly abstract words, and 3) words related to natural science for students majoring in social science. The relationship between common academic words’ frequency rankings and their correct answer rates on this test was not linear, which indicates that simply increasing the amount of input may not have a major learning effect.
