Developing a Receptive Vocabulary List for Japanese Junior High School Students: An Analysis of the Vocabulary Characteristics in Authorized Textbooks

抄録

Starting from the academic year 2021, English instruction based on the new Course of Study has been implemented. Six publishers have released authorized textbooks for this purpose. However, a pressing concern emerged: there is a need for explicit clarification regarding the importance of vocabulary and its prioritization in teaching. Despite no changes in the total number of class hours, the number of words to be taught has increased from 1,200 to a range of 1,600–1,800. This variation depends on the selected textbook, as the new Course of Study does not specify which vocabulary should be included within this range. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a vocabulary list to identify the words junior high school students commonly need to learn, regardless of the textbook used, grounded in corpus data extracted from the authorized textbooks. The following findings were obtained through this research: First, an extensive vocabulary range among authorized textbooks are exhibited, encompassing 2,365 to 3,755 word types and 23,007 to 43,095 tokens. This exceeds the initial 2,200 to 2,500 word estimate prescribed in the new Course of Study. Secondly, discrepancies in the number of word types and tokens were noted among the six textbooks. Thirdly, high-frequency words in the list appear in all six publications and in elementary school English textbooks. Finally, based on the coverage of the list in the textbooks, high-frequency words are identified as the essential vocabulary for junior high school students.