日本語教科書における「書くこと」の類型とその課題

Abstract

In order to clarify how writing is taught in the Japanese language classrooms of South Korean high schools, I turned to the Japanese textbooks High School Japanese I and II. I identified three aspects of teaching writing in Japanese – ‘notation-oriented teaching’, ‘grammar-oriented teaching’, and ‘teaching focused on written expression’ – and carried out an analysis which revealed the following three points. Firstly, I found that in the writing sections of High School Japanese I, ‘grammar-oriented teaching’ accounted for 65.2% of the material, the largest part. ‘Notation-oriented teaching’ was next, representing 30.8%, while ‘teaching focused on written expression’ made up only 4%. The results indicated that, in the writing sections of High School Japanese II, ‘grammar-related teaching’ accounted for the largest portion, at 77.2% of the total. ‘Notation-oriented teaching’ was next at 19.8%, while ‘teaching focused on written expression’ made up only 2.2%. Secondly, the analysis showed that in higher year groups, the proportion dedicated to ‘grammar-oriented teaching’ tends to increase while the proportion dedicated to ‘teaching focused on written expression’ tends to decrease. Thirdly, themed writing exercises, treated as ‘teaching focused on written expression’, can often be easily filled out using fixed greetings and sentence patterns (like those found in self-introductions and New Years Cards). This is a far cry from the kind of teaching which challenges students to think about a composition’s structure while cultivating their capacity for logical thought and expression, and brings into sharp relief the challenges connected to the teaching of writing in Japanese.