KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper explores differences in national language textbooks for elementary and middle schools between Korea and Japan, which are currently in use as of 2020, with a focus on the different school levels. To this end, the purpose of this study is to reveal characteristics of elementary and middle school textbooks by country in the semantic distribution of the vocabulary, on the basis of BunruiGoihyo(1964, 2004). Findings will also be compared with those in my former study in 2018, which analyzed middle and high school textbooks revised before 2016. In <high level classification> that divided the target vocabulary into five, significant differences were observed in <1.4 Product and Tool> and <1.5 Natural object and Natural phenomenon> in elementary school for both countries. This was an item that also showed a significant difference in middle school in my former study in 2018. In the end, it was clarified that the higher the school level, the fewer the words appearing in the corresponding area. Meanwhile, there was a more significant difference in Korean middle schools than in elementary schools in <1.3 Human activity, Mind and Behavior>. In Japanese middle schools, there was a significant difference in <1.2 Principal agent of human activity>, which shows the characteristics that elementary schools are nature and animal centered. In <middle level classification> that divided the target vocabulary into 43 categories, there were significant differences in about 20 items between elementary and middle schools in both countries, and the trend is also the same as the ‘<high level classification>. Elementary schools in Korea showed high significance in the order of machinery, animal, dwelling, living organism, nature/object, and tool, and Japanese elementary schools in the order of animals, nature/object, material and road/civil engineering. On the other hand, there were significant differences in foodstuff, duty, body, exchange and culture/history in Korean middle schools, whereas the significant differences were found in the order of human, economics, members/position, governance/politics, nation/region and partner/colleague in Japanese middle schools. There are differences in the theme and claims of textbooks between the two countries, to the extent that there is little in common between these two countries.

Elementary school national language textbooks, Middle school national language textbooks, Vocabularies, Lexical distribution, Socio-cultural characteristics