Abstract
It is pointed out that in textbooks based on a communicative approach, the amount of grammatical items at early stages is very large and the learner's load might be very great since they aim at introducing natural conversations as a very early stage. Thus this study investigated the amount of grammatical items in main Japanese textbooks for beginners. The results showed that even in sentence pattern oriented textbooks, the amount of grammatical items is very large at early stages and it varies greatly at later stages.
