A Study on the Validity of Key Words to Describe Japanese Language Teaching Materials

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The purpose of this study is to select the valid key words to describe Japanese language teaching materials by analyzing the log data which are recorded when people use our WWW services. In May 1999, we opened WWW services to read and search Japanese edition of Guide to Japanese Language Teaching Materials No.28 which was published by Bonjinsha publishing company, and through research presentations, ML(mailing list) , and link pages on WWW we asked people all over the world to use them. In October 2001, we collected 136,107 accesses in total; 133,026 for read only and 3,081 for search. The analysis of 3,081 cases clarified that the frequently used search items were students' level, title in Japanese, book description, language used in the texts, and the most frequently used key word was "conversation". The reason why "conversation" was highly used was not clear. It could be happened that the subject words such as "grammar", "listening", "writing", and "reading" were also searched, but they were not. In fact, experts of Japanese teaching believe that key words should show more variety: e.g. type of learners like "university student", "business person", "child", "resident", type of learning such as "intensive course", "large class", "self-access", and learning approach or way like "communicative", "project work", "game", etc. The experts judged the results on search items were reasonable. The results of this study will benefit the effective description of publishing catalogs and ads, and the production of essential teaching materials.