FOLIO 16 / l

STUDENT SPOT
Analysing textbool<s using the Littlejohn
frameworl<: Viewpoints from Japanese
pre-service student teachers
Simon Humphries, Misa Miyakoshi and Kenji Miyoshi

T extbooks are one of the main tools of the

trade in language teaching (Littlejohn, 2011),
and a study by Arkian (2008) indicated that
1. A summary of their findings using Littlejohn's
(2011) analytical framework based on their readings
of Littlejohn (2011) and Humphries (2013).
more than three-quarters of teachers use a textbook
for over half of their teaching. Nevertheless, 2. The advantages and disadvantages that they faced
because publishers may wish to maximise profits as pre-service trainee teachers using the framework.
by marketing their products to as wide a range of
contexts as possible, critics note that textbooks fail
to meet the local needs of teachers and learners
The Analytical Framework
(Hadley, 2013). It is beyond the scope of this paper to re-describe
Littlejohn's (2011) framework. The Appendix shows a
In Japan, despite the introduction of communicative
simplified/summarised description, based on Humphries
language teaching (CLT) in the secondary school
(2013), which was a supplementary reading to help the
curriculum, many teachers continue to use the
students to conduct the analysis. However, students
traditional reading comprehension and grammar-
read and discussed the full Littlejohn (2011) chapter
translation yakudoku approach (Humphries, 2012;
in detail, and readers may wish to do the same. To
Nishino and Watanabe, 2008). Two factors blamed
summarise, it is a three-stage process that moves from
for this phenomenon are the lack of classroom-
the concrete to the abstract. In stage 1, we compare
oriented training (Nagasawa, 2004) and the lack of
the levels of access to information and resources for
communicative activities in government-mandated
the teacher and students. The second stage is probably
textbooks (Humphries, 2013).
the most important part of the analysis. We select a
In an attempt to improve the preparation of chapter, identify the constituent activities and look
undergraduates who want to become English teachers for trends in what the learners are expected to do.
in Japan, Doshisha University introduced a materials Finally, the third stage contains the most abstract level
analysis and development course in 2012. Following of analysis, where we build upon the foundation from
three stages, students on the course: the previous two stages to uncover the underlying
implications.
1. study the principles that underlie common teaching
approaches;

2. analyse textbooks such as those mandated by the

Findings
Japanese government, based on the analytical
New Crown
framework designed by Littlejohn (2011);
.· New Crown is a widely used government-mandated
3. create their own materials.
textbook for junior high school students. After
This paper focuses on findings by two students analysing New Crown 3, which is the edition for grade
based on the second stage- the textbook analysis. 9 students, there were both positive and negative
Misa Miyakoshi analysed a junior high textbook aspects for teachers and learners.
aimed at ninth graders called New Crown (Takahashi,
The teacher's pack contains a teacher's textbook,
2012) and Kenji Miyoshi analysed a tenth grade
worksheet booklet, four teacher manuals, guidance
senior high textbook called Vivid (Minamimura, 2006).
book methodology guidance book, class CDs, teacher
Both textbooks claim to follow the government's
training CD and team teaching guidance book. It was
communicative guidelines. Misa and Kenji report from
felt that there were too many materials and teaching
two perspectives:
instructions, thus reducing the scope of originality

44
 - - - - - - - - - - - - ｦｯｬｩＱＶＯｕ｡ｾＲＰ＠ - - --

'":: ::eachers. There was also a difference between the counter to my expectations. On a simple level, there
:.;:;;._. aim of the textbook and the present situation of turned out to be more of these activities than I had
_:_:'anese j unior high school students. The textbook expected, because I can only remember translating
- ±lis to have the balance of four skills, reading, reading passages from my high school days. Despite
_.cing, listening, and speaking, on the surface, but the existence of output exercises, their frequency was
--:: ］ｾ ｭ ｳ＠ as though the textbook is trying to put more still quite low and limited to certain types. Spoken
::=;>basis on output through various activities. In output tasks were rare; instead, the textbook favoured
-::C.:ity however, Japan continues to have the juken written output and, in particular, gap-filling and
;::::ranee exam system, where the ninth grade junior substitution drills. As well as the limited range of
- : school students have to spend most of their the answers students would have to produce, there
ｾ ･＠ preparing for difficult reading and grammar- seemed to be a problem with the source of the answers.
=L>C'JSed examinations to enter senior high school. Students needed to answer questions related to content
-=-.s.erefo re, many teachers tend to teach English using from the reading passage or to complete grammatical
ｾ･＠ uaditional grammar-translation method rather drills. There was no scope for learners to provide
"±an focusing on communication, even if the required personal information or opinions.
:extbook aims at the new approach. Another problem
· ith the high English output approach is that the All in all, most findings from the analysis of the textbook
majority of the Japanese students are not used to using the Littlejohn framework were consistent with
speaking out and actively participating in class. Thus, my expectations. Vivid contains a number of reading
:hey feel more comfortable in the traditional form of comprehension and grammatical exercises, a limited
: =:n glish classes, where more Japanese is spoken than number of listening exercises, and sporadic pair work
::::nglish. and output activities, although a few more output tasks
are provided than I had expected.
The student textbook is accessible with the use of
colour printed graphics and topics that are easy for
Japanese students to relate to. It uses a variety of Advantages a!ld disadvantages of
O"enres from history to foreign cultures, which follows
the objectives stated in the government's policy of
the framework
developing future global leaders. The student textbook
Misa's view
and the supplementary workbook provide individual
study opportunities. There were both advantages and disadvantages of
the Littlejohn framework. The level 1 analysis (see
Overall, there are numerous ways to use New Crown,
Appendix) helped me to look at the balance of
which can be both positive and negative, depending
materials between teachers and students. It opened
on the student level and situation. It is necessary for
my eyes to an unfair balance of information between
teachers to analyse the students' needs and find the
teachers and students; therefore, when teaching in the
most appropriate use of the textbook according to the
future, I will need to make more materials to bridge
results of that analysis.
this gap. The level 2 analysis (see Appendix) helped
me to visually compare results through the creation of
Vivid graphs. In particular, the graphs helped me to see what
Vivid English Course I, which was authorised by was missing from the textbooks. In order to follow the
the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, government's communicative guidelines, I will need
Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2006, is designed to create materials that help students share personal
for grade 10 senior high school students in Japan. information and express their opinions in English.
First, I am going to show you some results that were However, it was bard to define some of the categories
consistent with the expectations that I had formed from the detailed appendix in Littlejohn (2011, pp.
before the analysis of Vivid, and then, I am going to 208- 11 ). especially in the mental operation section (pp.
show you some results that surprised me. 208-9) that delineates what the learner is expected to
I found three main results that were consistent with do. User requirements in this category such as repeat
my expectations. Firstly, the textbook leaned towards identically. repeat selectively, repeat with substitution,
grammar-translation and reading comprehension. repeat u·irh rransfonnarion and repeat with expansion
Every chapter of the textbook has a long reading are all :-om o; repetition and it is very likely that
passage, and the tasks are mainly related to its repeti ·on is ..:sed in Yarious ways for each activity.
comprehension and a particular grammatical item. In rhe er.·. : '-c. eO guess what type of repetition
Secondly, there were only one or two listening a re::cl::Er · ·o-- - ｾ･＠ in each case, which made the
activities in each chapter. Lastly, there were just one
or two pair work activities and no group tasks at all. I ｊＢ･ｓＺｚｾ＠ ｾ Ｍ -- - ＭＮｾｃ｜ﾷｯｲｫ＠ helped me to see various
The nature of the students' output activities ran pc.:= :: :..:.;: - ｾＭ c.r.d how they could be used
in more than one way. Unfortunately, the reality is grammar-translation approach suits Japanese students
that teachers in Japan tend to select only a couple of who want to prepare for entrance tests and fear a break
areas that they feel are needed for students to pass the away fro m the passive study style that they are used
entrance exam. For me personally, it has raised m · to. It is useful for these two student teachers to be able
awareness of possible different ways that I could use to relate their findings to their future jobs and to begin
each section of the textbook, so that I can add variety considering how they will use their materials to tackle
to my textbook use and my teaching. tensions between policy and contextual constraints.

Both students shared similar opinions regarding the

Kenji's view
strengths and weaknesses of the analytical framework.
This framework has two advantages. Firstly, it proposes They felt that the framework raised their awareness
that the textbook analyst should examin e every of different viewpoints and noted the need to forge
activity from many angles, which opens our eyes a balance of information between the teacher and
to different viewpoints. Secondly, through the level students through the creation of supplementary
2 analysis (see Appendix), we are able to quantify materials. Moreover, they both valued the visual and
our results. Therefore, we can visually demonstrate comparative power of the level 2 analysis (which
comparative results, which is useful for making reveals trends in what the users are required to do with
informed decisions to colleagues in meetings when we the materials - see Appendix) and that the results could
select new textbooks. (In a Japanese school, after the be used to make informed suggestions to colleagues
textbook has been selected, all teachers must use it, so during textbook selection meetings. On the negative
these textbook selection meetings are very important side, the student teachers noted the difficulties that
for them.) they faced when categorising the user requirements
from the extensive appendix in Littlejohn (2011,
However, I found it difficult to follow all the detailed pp. 208-11) and the time-consuming nature of the
categories from the appendix in Littlejohn's· chapter analysis. Indeed, when they become busy teachers, they
(Littlejohn 2011, pp.208-ll). For example, it was may decide that they have no time to use Littlejohn's
difficult for me to correctly categorise the focus of full approach. However, this framework is adaptable,
some activities (see Littlejohn 2011, p. 208) because so teacher trainers in different contexts could create
the boundaries of each user requirement were closely simplified versions containing contextually relevant
related and sometimes difficult to predict; in other user requirement examples.
words, it was difficult to separate form-focused and
meaning-focused user requirements from the combined
form-and-meaning-focused user requirement. In References
addition, the mental operation ·analysis contained too
many simultaneous user requirements (see Littlejohn Arkian, A. (2008). 'Topics of reading passages in ELT course
books: what do our students really read?' The Reading
2011, pp. 208-9). For example, just reading a sentence
Matrix, 8(2), 1-16.
out loud involves (a) working memory use, (b) long-
term memory use, (c) letter recognition, (d) word Hadley, G. (2013). Global textbooks in local contexts: An
recognition, (e) phonological decoding, (f) meaning/ empirical investigation of effectiveness, in N. Harwood (ed.),
grammar decoding, (g) syntactic parsing and (h) English Language Teaching Textbooks: Content, Consumption,
semantic-proposition encoding, each of which must Production. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
involve deeper mental operations. The problem with Humphries, S. (2012). From policy to pedagogy: Exploring
this level 2 analysis is how deeply the analyst should the impact of new communicative textbooks on the class-
think about the potential mental operations involved room practice of Japanese teachers of English, in C. Gitsaki
with an activity. The degree of depth will influence the Et R. B. Baldauf Jr. (eds), Future Directions in Applied
result of the textbook analysis. In the end, the decision Linguistics: Local and Global Perspectives. Newcastle:
about the depth of analysis may be influenced by the Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 488-507.
time available for the analyst. Humphries, S. (2013). 'Western-published versus MEXT-
mandated: A comparative textbook analysis'. Doshisha
Studies in English, 90, 217-238.
Concluding remarks Littlejohn, A. (2011). The analysis oflanguage teaching mate-
rials: Inside the Trojan Horse. In B. Tomlinson (ed.), Materials
In summarising the results of their analyses, both Kenji
Development in Language Teaching. 2nd ed. Cambridge:
and Misa focused on the amount and quality of output Cambridge University Press.
activities. Both these future teachers are probably
influenced by the situation in Japan discussed in Minamimura, T. (2006). Vivid English Course (New Edition)
the introduction. New Crown seems to support the I. Tokyo : Daiichi Gakushusha.
government's CLT-oriented policies, whereas, teachers Nagasawa, K. (2004). Teacher training and development. In
may prefer Vivid, which contains traditional exercises. V. Makarov a Et T. S. Rogers (eds), English language teaching:
As Misa points out, the traditional teacher-led The case of Jap an. Munich: Lincom.

46
Nishino, T., Et Watanabe, M. (2008). Communication-oriented Level 2 Categories of Analysis and Sample User
policies versus classroom realities in Japan. TESOL ｑｵ｡ｮｾｲ ｬｹＮ＠ Requirements (from Humphries, 2013, p. 221, drawn
42( 1), 133-138. on Littlejohn, 2011 , pp.209-11).
Takahashi, S. (2012). New Crown English Series 3. Tokyo:
Sanseido.
Category Sample User Requirements

Simon Humphries is currently an assistant professor Focus Meaning or Form

at Doshisha University in Kyoto. He received his PhD
Mental Operations Build Text or Decode
in linguistics from Macquarie University in 201 2
and his MSc in TESOL from Aston University in Semantic Meaning
2005. In addition to textbook analysis, his recent and Turn Taking Initiate or Respond
forthcoming publications focus on action research,
codeswitching and classroom interaction, issues in With Whom? Pair Work or Individually
implementing communicative approaches and issues in
classroom observation. Information Source Materials or Learners

Email: simonhumphries @icloud. corn Learner Input Graphic or Written

Learner Output Oral or Written

Misa Miyakoshi is currently a fourth grade student at Nature of Content Personal Information or
Doshisha University, studying English sociolinguistics Metalinguistic Knowledge
and education in the Faculty of Letters, English
Department. She will teach at a secondary school in
Tokyo, starting April 2014. Potential Level 3 Underlying Principles (based on
Humphries, 2013, pp . .231-236).
Email: [email protected]

Congruity of stated aims and underlying values

Kenji Miyoshi is currently a fourth year undergraduate
in the English Department at Doshisha University. His Principles of selection and sequencing
research interests include learning English as a foreign
language (EFL}, reading in English and cognitive Teacher and learner roles
effects on EFL learning. He will teach English at high
The use of knowledge
school from 2014.
Development of study skills
Email: [email protected]
Social values

Appendix
Level 1 Analysis: Suggested Areas (based on
Humphries, 2013, pp. 220-221, drawn on Littlejohn,
201 1, pp.208-9).

Target groups of users

Stated aims

Balance of information between the teacher and

learners

Followed by a chapter-focused description of the

ma in sections of instruction.