Opportunities to learn high-frequency and newly-introduced words in Japanese and Taiwanese Senior High-school EFL textbooks: A comparative study

This study compares and contrasts senior high school EFL textbooks made in Japan and Taiwan in terms of the vocabulary learning opportunities they provide, focusing on high-frequency and newly-introduced lemmas. This examination is warranted because of the importance of vocabulary development in the process of learning English and the fact that textbooks serve as the primary source of language input for EFL students. Taiwan has received a significantly higher ranking than Japan in international English proficiency examinations (e.g., TOEFL), despite the fact that English is a foreign language in both countries and that the Japanese and Chinese languages are both historically distant from the English language. The findings may potentially make a valuable contribution to EFL textbook development in Japan. The present study addresses two sets of research questions. The first set of research questions examines how many high-frequency lemmas (a lemma being a headword and its most common inflections) are included in the target textbooks and which proportion of the running words in the textbooks they can account for. The second set of research questions investigates the frequency levels of newly-introduced lemmas, their repetition rate, and the extent to which they appear across the units of each textbook. The analysis was conducted using a corpus constructed from the target textbooks as well as two frequency-based lemmatized wordlists, the new-GSL (Brezina and Gablasova, 2015) and the BNC wordlist (Kilgarriff, 2006). Findings revealed that, in comparison to the Japanese textbooks, the Taiwanese textbooks offered their students a greater number of opportunities to learn both high-frequency and newly-introduced lemmas. The differences in the quantity of English input and the selection of target vocabulary are deliberated upon as possible factors contributing to the aforementioned differences between the Japanese and Taiwanese textbooks.