A Basic Quantitative Study on the Factors Affecting Word Selection in Japanese Textbooks since the 1950s

Abstract

There have been few reports on how authors of Japanese textbooks select the vocabulary to teach in their textbooks. It is considered that the words to teach in a textbook are selected based on an overall consideration of various factors such as learners' skill, practical usefulness and vocabulary in existing textbooks. However, comparative quantitative studies on vocabulary selection in textbooks have hitherto been very limited. In this study, we conducted basic analyses to delineate the process and trends of vocabulary selection in Japanese textbooks, in which we compared vocabulary in popular Japanese textbooks from each decade since the 1950s, and quantitatively measured the similarity and difference among them. In addition, we gave some explanations about the reasons for the trends in selection by referring to a newspaper database as a corpus, and to existing literature.