A Quantitative Study of Basic Japanese Textbooks from the Perspective of Corpus Linguistics

Sun Qi

Tianjin Foreign Studies University

Abstract：

Guided by the theories of corpus linguistics, this study conducts a systematic quantitative analysis of widely-used basic Japanese textbooks in China, aiming to explore the distribution features, repetition patterns and presentation paths of vocabulary and grammar in these textbooks. Three mainstream textbooks are selected as research subjects: Newly Compiled Japanese, Comprehensive Course of Basic Japanese and Standard Japanese for Sino-Japanese Communication. A textbook corpus with a total size of approximately 2 million words is established. Referring to the vocabulary and grammar lists of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), this research adopts multiple analytical methods including word frequency analysis, grammatical annotation statistics and text difficulty measurement to carry out multi-dimensional investigations.The results reveal discrepancies in the coverage rate of core vocabulary among the three textbooks, with the average vocabulary repetition rate lower than five times. Grammatical items present a distribution pattern of dense at the early stage and sparse at the later stage. Additionally, the matching degree between the difficulty gradient of textbook texts and the complexity of language points needs to be improved. This research innovatively applies corpus methods to the evaluation of Japanese textbooks in a systematic manner, and puts forward data-driven suggestions for textbook optimization. It provides empirical evidence for the compilation of Japanese textbooks and Japanese language teaching practice.

Key Words：

corpus linguistics; Japanese textbooks; quantitative analysis; vocabulary distribution; grammar repetition; textbook evaluation