Analyzing Textbooks of Language

Introduction & Background Information

The study investigates two textbooks designed for English speakers studying Japanese as a foreign language. Both of the books are designed for beginner-to-intermediate-level students. A large amount of the activities (or exercises) built into both textbooks require the cooperation between two or more learners, they are designed for classroom instructions of language teaching. The textbook Nihongo de Hanasoo 3 (referred as Book A in the following) claims to focus on the Speaking of Japanese based on a grammatical and situational approaches; Genki II (Book B) aims to help the learners develop the four basic skills known as, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, under a comprehensive approach.

According to Johnson (2008), many textbooks follow a structural syllabus that focuses on language structures (e.g. grammatical forms) (pp.219-238). The four main skills are: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Johnson suggests listening and reading activities as designed to practice the receptive skills of learners, and is often organized in order (e.g. Reading: pre-reading, while-reading, post-reading activities). Speaking and writing are productive skills. Practices of these skills usually involve comprehension, which relates to the cognitive process of learning that helps learners to acquire (pp. 278-279).

Listening often engages the learners to capture not just the main idea of the text but also linguistic patterns like the sound or lexical meaning of the target language, which always associate with learners’ own knowledge to bring into the process of listening (Lynch & Mendelsohn, 2002).

According to Bygate (2002), a practice on speaking should engage the learners as active decision maker, which means the activities should provide ‘drills’ for learners to form utterances based on accurate use of the language, which does not simply rely on repetition of learnt patterns of the language.

Bamford and Day...