A correspondence analysis of seventeen Japanese historical English-as-a-foreign-language textbooks

Abstract

The present paper aims to quantitatively analyze the features of seventeen Japanese historical EFL (English as a Foreign Language) textbooks, Book 1, and their current counterpart, by using a correspondence analysis (henceforth CA), focusing on their similarities / differences. The following are the obtained results. First, the CA results proved capable of differentiating the features of the seventeen historical textbooks and their current counterpart quantitatively, specifying their similarities and differences. In particular, the CA 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. The locations of the eighteen textbooks on the CA map indicated that, while the feature of difficulty / easiness and that of naturalness / artificiality were closely related to each other with the seventeen historical textbooks, only the current one has the feature of easiness and that of naturalness at the same time. Second, the explaining categories (dimensions, axes) proved to be difficult vs. easy texts (Dim 1), natural-sounding vs. artificial-sounding discourse (Dim 2), passage-based vs. dialogue-based texts (Dim 3), teacher dominance vs. non teacher dominance (Dim 4), strictly-controlled vs. loosely-controlled texts (Dim 5), concise vs. redundant texts (Dim 6) and connected vs. disconnected contents (Dim 7). Third, the whole pictures of the relationships of the eighteen textbooks were described by a dendrogram, which visually summarized all of the features (similarities and differences) among the eighteen nominal variants in the present analysis. Finally, it was concluded that the results of the present study suggest that CA is a useful tool for describing, interpreting and diagnosing the features of Japanese EFL textbooks.