A Study of EFL Teaching Material Generating System on the Internet

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In this study I developed a total computational system that automatically generates EFL teaching materials utilizing the newspaper/magazine articles distributed on the Internet. First I classified a number of articles into several categories with which Japanese EFL learners feel at home. Secondly a new system is developed that process the articles based on the level of the power of vocabulary of the learners. In developing this system, I had to grasp in detail the level of vocabulary in accordance with the textbooks learners are using on a daily basis. There are seven types of junior-high school English textbooks certified by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture. In these certified textbooks the Ministry specifies the basic vocabulary that all the students should be exposed during the three years in junior-high school. However, I had to construct a complete word database that includes not only those specified words but other words and phrases adopted by the editors of the seven textbooks.The created system accepts requests from unspecific users of the site, who are EFL teachers, and presents an elaborate menu for choosing the level of the learners for whom the teachers want to make teaching materials. After the system accepts the request, it reforms the Web page which the users want to be processed in various interfaces. What is significant for this system is described as follows : the users are allowed to utilize the articles with the newest content as their EFL teaching materials ; and the system itself can be modified to comply the request from the teachers who want to make an entrance examinations for high-schools or even for colleges by switching the vocabulary database with which the system refers. As a result, the system can present a detailed foundation for making EFL teaching materials with a lot of potential.