“First Steps towards Japanese Language Textbook Design” – Mary Murata and Dr Becky Muradás-Taylor

Our project focusses on two research questions: 1) Do any existing textbooks meet the needs of our students? 2) What content do our students need to prepare them for study abroad?

Using the data gathered from the project we hope to be able to design tailor-made materials or a text book which best suits the needs of our students.

– Murata and Muradás-Taylor (12)

In this paper, Mary Murata and Dr Becky Muradás-Taylor assess the usefulness of widely available Japanese Language textbooks in the UK, with the hope that this data will aid in the production of new teaching materials which best meet the needs of students at York St John University and beyond.

The survey of commonly used text books revealed that, although some of them have excellent features, there is no textbook easily available in the UK that matches both our preferred teaching style and the age and type of students that we are teaching. This reinforces our need to develop new, tailor-made materials.

– Murata and Muradás-Taylor (16)

The article can be downloaded here.