This study analyses the communicative functions of listening scripts extracted from the 2015 elementary school English 6 and middle school English 1 textbooks in terms of continuity. Auditory data corpora were drawn from all five elementary school English textbooks and five most widely used middle school English textbooks. Each sentence of listening scripts was manually tagged based on the classification of communication functions presented in the 2015 Revised National Curriculum. The corpora were analyzed using 14 syntactic complexity measures with the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010). The findings of this study show that the continuity between the elementary school English 6 and the middle school English 1 textbooks is relatively well-organized. However, concerning the sequence, the elementary school English 6 was found to be more complex than the middle school English 1 in terms of syntactic complexity. It is suggested that future textbook development should correct the reversed complexity in listening scripts found in this study.

The present study sought to examine the continuity of the English textbooks of the elementary school 6th grade and the middle school 1st grade by analyzing the readability and vocabulary difficulty of their reading passages. It investigated the continuity between textbooks of the two grades and among chapters of each textbook. For the analysis, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Index was used to measure the readability of reading passages, whereas vocabulary difficulty was measured in terms of TTR (type-token ratio) and frequency by using VocabProfile. The results showed that the readability of middle school textbooks was one point higher than that of elementary school textbooks. Given that the readability index is based on the American school system, the increase in readability index between grades can be seen as large gap. In terms of vocabulary difficulty, the total amount of vocabulary in the middle school textbooks was three times as much as that of the elementary school textbooks. Second, readability index fluctuated across the chapters of each textbook, while the TTR was found to be higher in the former chapters than in the latter chapters in elementary school textbooks. All these could lead to learning difficulties for students. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

This study aimed to identify the continuity between 6th grade elementary school English textbooks and 1st grade middle school English textbooks using Coh-Meu'ix, an automated web-based program designed to analyze and calculate the coherence oftexts on a wide range of measures. The measured value of text types was compared and classified into the surface linguistic features (the basic count, word rrequency, readabi li ty, connective information, pronoun information, word information) and the deep linguistic features (co-referential cohesion and semantic cohesion, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity). The findings were as follows: First, the basic counts and words before the main verb had a significant different value between two levels of textbooks. The results were remarkably different in the written language. Second, FKGL (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level) and the pronoun ratio were significantly different only in the written language. In addition, type-token ratios in written language showed more significant differences than spoken language. Third, other language features showed only a mild and gradual difference. Finally, the resu lt indicated there were no statistical differences of discourse aspects.