Comparison of Textbooks Used in the Late 2000s and Now: From the Viewpoint of Characteristic Features of Authentic Dialogues

抄録

The revised Course of Study for upper secondary schools, which was implemented in fiscal 2022, newly emphasizes the importance of spoken interaction and improvisation. In this paper I take up the issue of text authenticity and analyze dialogues in the textbooks now and those used in the late 2000s, when a more relaxed education policy was introduced, from the viewpoint of to what extent they reflect characteristic features of authentic dialogues. The results of the comparison revealed that (1) generally speaking, the dialogues of both recent and older textbooks reflect the nature of authentic conversation in terms of lexical density, (2) the dialogues of recent textbooks still have not adopted some features of authentic conversation (e.g., false starts and terminal overlaps) and they became rather worse in the adoption of repetitions and latching, and (3) though not to a sufficient degree, some improvement has been made in the frequency of hesitation devices and back-channels, and the variety of the former also increased. These results indicate a necessity for the textbooks to adopt more and a wider variety of features of authentic conversation in the dialogues.