A Correspondence Analysis of Seventeen Japanese Historical Third-Year English-as-a Foreign-Language Textbooks

Abstract

The present paper aims to quantitatively analyze the features of seventeen Japanese historical English-as-a-Foreign-Language textbooks, Book 3, and their current counterpart, by using a correspondence analysis, focusing on their similarities / differences, and to compare the results with those of the correspondence analysis of the Book-1 textbooks of the same set used in the present study.  Before further going on to the description or analysis of the rest of the dimensions specified so far, a tentative assessment of the two major dimensions was conducted so as to evaluate the basic strategy adopted in the present correspondence analysis, which brought about a conclusion that the eighteen textbooks were distributed in such a skewed way due to the strong influence of Seisoku-3 that it was extremely difficult to continue the interpretation.  Based on this judgement, it was concluded that it is more productive to stop the present correspondence analysis of the eighteen textbooks and to restart anew with a correspondence analysis of seventeen variants, excluding Seisoku-3.  The following were the obtained results of the correspondence analysis of the seventeen textbooks.  First, the correspondence analysis results proved capable of differentiating the features of the sixteen historical textbooks and their current counterpart quantitatively, specifying their similarities and differences.  In particular, the correspondence analysis map comprised of the two major dimensions specified indicated that both of the two dimensions, Dim 1 (difficult vs. easy texts) and Dim 2 (natural-sounding vs. artificial-sounding discourse) contributed to differentiating their inter-relationships.  Second, the explaining categories (dimensions, axes) proved to be explained 83.1 percent by seven dimensions, i.e., difficult vs. easy texts (Dim 1), natural-sounding vs. artificial-sounding discourse (Dim 2), dialogue-based vs. passage-based texts (Dim 3), teacher dominance vs. no teacher dominance (Dim 4), strictly controlled vs. loosely controlled texts (Dim 5), redundant vs. concise texts (Dim 6) and connected vs. disconnected contents (Dim 7).  Third, the similarities / differences of the seventeen Book-3 textbooks were explained by the same categories of the Book-1 result up to the seventh dimension.  There were, however, small modifications had to be made on Dim3 and Dim 6, where the location of (positive, negative) poles were reversed.  Finally, the results of the present Correspondence Analysis(CA) were graphically represented by two methods, (1) two-dimensional coordinate representation covering only two major dimensions, Dim 1 and Dim 2, and (2) cluster-analysis-based dendrogram covering all the features of sixteen dimensions.  These representation revealed that on the two-dimensional coordinate representation, only two textbooks, Sunshine-3 and Inoue-p3, were separated as distinctively different from the other fifteen textbooks in terms of the two features, i.e., difficulty / easiness (Dim 1) and naturalness / artificialness (Dim 2), while on the dendrogram covering all of the sixteen features or categories specified, three textbooks, Inoue-p3, Sunshine-3 and Mombusho-p3 were separated as distinctively different from the others.  These facts could suggest that all categories considered, two textbooks, Inoue-p3 and Mombusho-p3 should be included in the forerunner group represented by the current textbook, Sunshine-3.

https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.18.4.2