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.

This study aims to evaluate summaries by Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and identify their characteristics based on three indices: lexical overlap (the commonality between specific words and phrases between a summary and the original text), semantic overlap (the degree of semantic relatedness between a summary and its source text), and lexical sophistication (the diversity and complexity of the vocabulary used in a summary). These indices were calculated using the Constructed Response Analysis Tool (CRAT), an automated English writing assessment tool. Japanese EFL learners’ summaries were analyzed using CRAT, and correlation and decision-tree analyses were conducted to investigate relationships between the indices. Subsequently, decision-tree analyses were conducted to identify the indices that had a significant impact on the summary scores. The important indices for Japanese EFL learners included verb-unigram overlap percentage for lexical overlap, Latent Semantic Analysis similarity or synonym overlap for semantic overlap, and psycholinguistic indices for lexical sophistication. The findings using objective indices from CRAT could inform Japanese EFL teachers’ feedback and summary instructions, contributing to the development of EFL learners’ summary writing and teachers’ evaluation efficiency.

The importance of language assessment literacy (LAL) for teachers has been widely recognized in the field of language assessment. However, previous research showed insufficient teachers’ LAL caused by a lack of training. Although sufficient LAL could have a positive effect on learning or educational practices, there have been few investigations into teachers’ LAL in Japan. To address this gap, this mixed-methods study examined the pre-service and in-service teachers’ received training in the past, their training needs in the future, and their perceptions of assessment training by replicating Vogt and Tsagari’s (2014) study conducted in Europe. The results of the questionnaire administered to 72 respondents and follow-up interviews with eight of them showed that the participants received insufficient assessment training in various areas of classroom-based assessment. As for the training needs, teachers reported needing practical training that can be applied to the classroom easily, though the importance of considering contextual factors was also emphasized. The findings of this study provide insights into the consideration of the contents of assessment training to improve teachers’ LAL in Japan.