Japanese textbooks, the New Zealand tertiary sector and a discourse-based approach to teaching: Old business as usual.

Over the past few decades, published research in discourse analysis (DA) has grown rapidly, and has yielded insights that could usefully inform the teaching and learning of languages. In this paper, we report on the results of an analysis of the most popular Japanese language learning textbook series used in the New Zealand tertiary sector in terms of the extent to which the series can be shown to have been influenced by aspects of discourse analysis research. In the initial findings reported in this paper, there appears to be almost no sign of the influence of DA research into the development of the Genki textbook series (Banno, Ikeda, Ohno, Shinagawa & Tokashiki, 2011). One of the main issues evident is the cognitive overload of grammatical structures in each chapter. In view of the prevalence of the use of this textbook series in the New Zealand tertiary context and the lack of implementation of current language cognition research in Japanese language learning, we believe these issues are worth exploring