No abstract

In spite of the decreasing population of teenagers in Japan, the university entrance exams continue to be one of the toughest events where their intelligence is tested, which include their competency level of English. However, very few researches have conducted on English exams. This study is a part of the continuous study the researchers have started in 2017, which studied the English entrance exams of eight national universities. They were selected from the list according to the T-score; two schools from 4 levels. The current study added the results of 2018 exams of the same universities. Upon digitalizing their English exams, the researchers first measured their readability levels using Ozasa-Fukui Year Level. They also performed Correspondence Analysis to study the interrelations among the nine exams. All eight exams are measured to be 7 th year or higher by Ozasa-Fukui Year Level, which is created to measure English level according to the 6 years in the secondary school system in Japan. The correspondence analysis produced 7 dimensions. However, due to the unexpectedly high value of one exam, the other seven exams' interrelations became obscured; we have decided to perform another analysis without that particular exam. Its results showed that the seven exams could be categorized according to "business and culture" and "family." The researchers further employed Cluster Analysis to study all seven dimensions produced by Correspondence Analysis, which showed that Kyoto18 and Hokkaido18 have strong ties with each other. We believe this study has given us a definite starting point for the research on the university entrance exams in Japan.

In 2020, Japan started a new English curriculum in which English classes began from grade 5, based on the latest edition of the Course of Study (the guideline produced by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). The objectives of this research paper are to examine seven sets of newly published English textbooks’ reading and listening sections to learn about their specific features, as well as their difficulty levels. The result demonstrates that in all seven sets of textbooks, the listening sections have far more volume of content than the reading sections. The readability tests indicate that the reading sections contain higher levels of sentences, which contradicts the authors’ initial impression. However, a careful study of the use of past tense verbs and prepositions in each section demonstrates that there are more prepositions in all seven sets of textbooks in the listening sections. The results indicate that past tense verbs and prepositions can be effective benchmarks to measure the readability level of these newly published English textbooks.