This paper aims to illuminate the socio-cultural characteristics of the national language textbooks, which Korea and Japan intend to make their students influenced by, through drawing on the significant differences between categories that appear in lexical distributions by areas of the meaning of vocabulary in the current national language textbooks for middle school students in Korea and Japan.
For a qualitative change, the lexical distributions were compared according to the five major categories of Bunruigoihyou (1964, 2004). In the case of Korean textbooks, there are significant differences in the order of <1.2>, <1.4>, and <1.3> based on the total number of words. In the case of Japanese textbooks, significant differences are in the order of <1.5> and <1.1>. It was also compared with Lee(2020) that analyzed the vocabulary of a first-year textbook, which revealed the significant difference in <1.2> and <1.3>, <1.5> is shrinking. Therefore the characteristics of first-year textbooks are now slightly ambiguous.
These tendencies were also found in the medium categories. In the case of Korean textbooks, significant differences were found in ＜human＞，<race･people>, <family>, <members･position> <duty>, <mind>, <economy>, <dwelling>, <clothing>, <foodstuff>, <body> and <life>. On the other hand, Japanese textbooks are different from Korean ones in terms of <instruction>, <quantity>, <time>, <space>, <living organism>, <nature･object>, <animal>, <creation･writing>, and <machinery>.
In particular, Korean textbooks have more vocabulary associated with humans and families than Japanese ones, while Japanese textbooks have more words related to information literacy which is the same tendency shown in the previous textbooks. In addition, the revision of Japanese textbooks has resulted in a decrease in literature-related vocabulary and an emphasis on environmental and ecological themes.