Abstract
In this presentation, we report on the development of a word level checking system for determining word levels in a text. The Word Familiarity Checker was developed using data found in Special Characteristics of Japanese Vocabulary (Amano & Kondo, 1999) and ranks all words in a text into one of five levels depending on the degree of familiarity. It also creates word lists corresponding to each level of difficulty, and shows a total count for the number of words from the combined lists. This checker will be available on-line in the near future at the Japanese Language Reading Tutorial System "Reading Tutor". (http://language.tiu.ac.jp)
