ABSTRACT
Described here is a pilot development of a method for analyzing the structural content of a set of teaching materials, underwritten by the Committee for Cooperation on English in Japan and conducted in cooperation with the Fulbright Program in Japan and the English Language Education Department of the Faculty of Education at Hiroshima University. A basic assumption underlying the study was that teaching materials have a direct influence on learning and that some root causes of inefficiency in the teaching-learning process could be identified by rigorous and detailed analysis of the teaching materials. The most basic guideline of the study was intelligibility by those involved in teaching English and training teachers in Japan. The set of teaching materials examined was the three-volume junior high school English language textbook “New Horizon.” The first part of the study concentrated mainly on the overall plan for the selection, sequencing and textual presentation of a set of teaching points. Pattern analysis was made on the basis of the verb “be” and four sentence patterns. The utterances were examined in terms of their grammatical usage and distribution, and verb structures. This method of analysis was then applied to another set of materials and the results were compared. The second project analyzed the structural content of the practice exercises in the first set of materials. (AMM)
