Preparations for a Vocabulary Survey on Japanese Beginning Learners of German : Verb

The vocabulary abilities of foreign language beginners are thought to strongly correlate with the textbooks that they are using. In German language education in Japan, however, mainly only the textbooks have been analyzed for word frequencies and word types, while the actual vocabulary abilities of the students have not been researched enough. Thus, we are now planning to carry out a thorough vocabulary survey on several hundred Japanese beginning learners of German at the school. Admittedly, this is small-scale, but as a first step, a multiple choice vocabulary test with 100 basic verbs has been developed. In the selection procedure of these 100 verbs, at first the 254 verbs contained in The Hiroshima University German Words List for Beginners (Iwasaki 2012) were compared with both the list of Glaboniat u.a. (2005), whose words are selected according to the CEFR, and also with the list of Tschirner (2008), which is based on the Herder/ BYU-Korpus. Finally, the verbs were also compared with the ranking list of the most frequently used verbs in 18 textbooks that had recently been used in German beginners classes at Hiroshima University