【Teaching Practice Report】

Identifying the CEFR-J Levels of the Reading Texts Introduced
in a Course for Current English 1 (Reading)
Aika Miura
Abstract
The study investigates the difficulties of the reading materials covered in an optional course for reading current news
articles, and examines the validity of introducing authentic materials without making pedagogical amendments.
The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)-based Vocabulary Level Analyzer (CVLA),
which analyses the text level according to the four indexes based on the CEFR-J Wordlist, was used to assign the
CEFR-J levels to the texts from the two types of course materials: (i) news articles in the assigned textbook and (ii)current online articles regarding the Sustainable Developmental Goals and the COVID-19 pandemic selected by theenrolled students. While the length of the articles was controlled in the edited textbook accompanied by various
scaffolding activities to ensure a deep understanding of the materials, no pedagogical adjustments were made to theauthentic articles. The quantitative analyses indicated that there were no major differences in the difficulties between
these two text groups; most of the texts were assigned as C1 and C2, the most advanced levels in the CEFR-J.
Keywords: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), CEFR-J, CEFR-based
Vocabulary Level Analyzer (CVLA), text level

Introduction
This paper investigates the difficulties of the reading texts introduced in a course entitledCurrent English 1 (Reading) in the spring semester of the 2020 academic year. The course targeted 24
sophomore, junior, and senior students at Rikkyo University, and was conducted completely online via
Zoom. In this course, along with nine units from the assigned textbook titled, Meet the World: English
Through Newspapers 2020 published by Seibido (Wakaari, 2020), each student was asked to choose acurrent newspaper article on the Internet, present an oral summary of the article using PowerPoint
slides, and submit a written summary at the end of the course. Although the reading materials fromthe assigned textbook were edited to control the number of words of the text in each unit, and various
scaffolds (e.g., Japanese translations for some vocabulary, a short summary with listening activities,
and true-or-false quizzes) were provided to help students understand the content, the texts derived
from the online news articles selected by the students were authentic and not pedagogically controlled
by the teacher. To assess the validity of introducing authentic materials to the course, this study
identifies the difficulty level of every text the students encountered in this course using a web-based
tool called the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)-based Vocabulary
Level Analyzer (ver. 1.1) (CVLA) (Uchida, n.d.; Uchida & Negishi, 2018), and examines the differences
between the controlled texts in the published textbook and authentic texts from online news sites.

Course Description
The target course is Current English (1) Reading, which was taught by the author in the springsemester of the 2020 academic year. In 2020, Rikkyo University took the special measure to conduct
all English courses online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, this course was taught remotely,1

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using the online video communication tool Zoom. This course was one of the minor (i.e., optional)
subjects for sophomore, junior, and senior students, and 24 students were enrolled. Table 1 describes
the course objective and contents, which follow the unified syllabus of this course provided by Rikkyo
University.
Table 1
Objective and Contents of the Course
Objective

Contents

The aims of this course are for students toread, understand, and then discuss both
domestic and international English-language
news articles while learning about a variety
of topical issues.

This is a low-intermediate English reading course. Students willlearn to read and understand English-language news articles, either
online or via print media, building on the reading strategies learned
1
in R&W1 . Students will also build their vocabulary and further
enhance the discussion skills learned in their first year while learning
about a variety of topical issues, both domestic and global.

Following the standard course objective and contents provided by the unified syllabus describedabove, two types of reading materials were given, as follows.
1.
The textbook titled, Meet the World: English Through Newspapers (Wakaari, 2020) was
assigned, as it was a suggested coursebook in the unified syllabus provided by Rikkyo
University. Nine out of 20 units were covered. Each unit contains an article published by Jiji
Press, and so on, in January 2019. As written in Table A1 in the Appendix, the token, whichis the total number of words contained in each text, ranges from 239 to 355.
2.
Twenty-four news articles selected from the Internet by the students were shared in class.
Each student was asked to select a news article on current issues, especially regarding
the Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs) and/or COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty-threearticles were published between March and July 2020, except for the one released in
January 2018, as shown in Table A2 in the Appendix. The main sources of the articles
include The Japan Times, BBC, CNN, National Geographic, and NHK. The token of eacharticle differs greatly, ranging from 421 words to more than 2,000 words. The author madea corpus containing these texts (i.e., the focus corpus explained below) in the Sketch Engine(Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o., 2020), which is an online text analysis tool. Using this tool,
keyword analyses (i.e., identifying individual words appearing more frequently in thefocus corpus than in the reference corpus) were conducted. The English Web Corpus 2015
(enTenTen15), which is a web text corpus containing 13 billion words created in 2015,
was used as a reference corpus. The top four single keywords in the focus corpus were
coronavirus (appearing in 17 texts), lockdown (in nine texts), pandemic (in 15 texts), andpreprint (in one text), and the top four multi-word keywords were social distancing (in 10
texts), labor shortage (in two texts), coronavirus pandemic (in three texts), and coronavirus
crisis (in three texts).
The articles from the first group were given for the detailed reading activity with various activities
accompanied as mentioned in the Introduction section, while those from the second group were used
to let the students have opportunities to read for gist (i.e., skimming). The Results and Discussion
1“R&W1” is an abbreviation of the course titled “Reading & Writing 1,” which was one of the compulsory courses for firstyear students at Rikkyo University.

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IDENTIFYING THE CEFR-J LEVEL S OF THE REA DING TEXTS INTRODUCEDIN A COURSE FOR CURRENT ENGLISH 1 (REA DING)

section describes detailed textual features of both groups. Tables A1 and A2 in the Appendix provide
the source, headline, token, and date of publication of the articles.
Tables 2 and 3 describe how each unit or authentic article was taught and covered.
Table 2Standard Lesson Plan Using the Assigned Textbook
Activity

Pre-study at home

Details• The sections from “Before reading 1” (i.e., introduction to the target topic in Japanese)and “Before reading 2” (i.e., keywords introduction in Japanese and English)• Reading a given article
2• The sections from “While reading 1” (i.e., taking notes instructed in Japanese), “While
reading 2” (i.e., matching the topic of each paragraph with phrases in Japanese), “While
reading 3” (i.e., gap filling exercise of the summary of the article), and “While reading5” (i.e., true-or-false quiz to check the understanding of the content)

Class• The teacher gives feedback on the pre-study at home.

Post-study at home

• Online quiz via Blackboard (i.e., the university’s Learning Management System): The
sections from “After reading 1” (i.e., completing sentences by changing the orders ofwords with Japanese translations) and “After reading 2” (i.e., matching given words
and the definitions)Note. Wakaari (2020)

Table 3Standard Lesson Plan Using the Students’ Selected Articles on Current Issues
Participant

2

Activities

Presenter(once per student)

1. Find an online news article on current issues regarding the SDGs and/or
COVID-19, and post the URL on the forum (keijiban in Japanese, or discussion
board) on Blackboard, where everyone can share comments with other classmates.
2. Present an oral summary of the article using PowerPoint slides.
3. Submit a written summary (plus their own opinions, if necessary) of the article inmore than 450 words by the end of the course.

Audience(every class except for when
they are the presenters)

1. Scan/browse the selected articles before class.
2. After class, post comments/thoughts/opinions about the presentation on the forum
on Blackboard in more than 50 words of English.

Presenter & Audience(every class)

The teacher gives a supplementary explanation on the content and vocabulary after
the presenter has completed their presentation.

The “While reading 4” section contains a listening activity to check the answers for “While reading 5,” which was coveredin class.

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Preceding the lessons described above, the teacher provided the following lessons as a series of
introductory lectures:
1.
Lesson 1: Introduce various websites of the world news (e.g., BBC and CNN), news inJapan (e.g., The Japan Times and The Japan News by The Yomiuri Shimbun), and world
science news (e.g., National Geographic and Science News for Students), totaling 17 sites,and explain the key concepts and vocabulary of the SDGs, such as 17 goals, five Ps (people,
prosperity, planet, peace, and partnership), and keywords (e.g., sustainable, inclusive, andresilient) (United Nations, n.d.).
2.
Lesson 2: Review the various reading skills learned in R&W courses (e.g., previewing,
scanning, skimming, and annotating) and introduce a sample article regarding the SDGs
and COVID-19 (Solberg & Akufo-Addo, 2020).
3.
Lesson 3: Instruct how to give a presentation online using Zoom and review various reading
skills (e.g., identifying the main ideas, summarizing, etc.)
4.
Lesson 4: Instruct how to write a summary based on the presentation (e.g., writing an essay
and formatting)

Background to the Study
The CEFR describes what language learners can do at different stages of their learning, andessentially divides language proficiency into six levels, A1 and A2 (i.e., Basic User), B1 and B2 (i.e.,
Independent User), and C1 and C2 (i.e., Proficient User), and has been widely used worldwide as aframework for language learning, teaching, and assessment (English Profile, n.d.; Council of Europe,2020). For anyone involved in English language education, such as material writers, test developers,
teachers, and teacher trainers, the English Profile (n.d.) offers online tools, such as the English
Vocabulary Profile (EVP) and the English Grammar Profile (EGP), providing information about the
CEFR level of words, phrases, idioms, collocations, and grammatical forms. In Japan, the CEFR-J wasdeveloped by adapting the CEFR for English language teaching in Japan (Tono, 2013; Tono, 2020;
Tono & Negishi, 2020). The A and B levels were subdivided, and the Pre-A1 level was added to theoriginal CEFR as follows: Pre-A1, A1 (A1.1, A1.2, and A1.3), A2 (A2.1 and A2.2), B1 (B1.1 and B1.2),B2 (B2.1 and B2.2), C1, and C2 (Tono, 2013; Tono, 2020). Several resources based on the CEFR-J are
available on the website, including the whole CEFR-J package, the CEFR-J Wordlist, and the CEFR-J
Grammar Profile. In the present study, the CEFR-J Text Profile, which is an online application tool
called CVLA (Uchida, n.d.; Uchida & Negishi, 2018), was used to assign the CEFR-J levels to thereading texts introduced in the course.

Method and Procedure
First, the articles of the assigned textbooks and the ones selected by the students from online
news sites were all transformed into TXT files. The pages of the target units from the textbook were
scanned using Optical Character Recognition, and only the main articles were manually extracted.
Regarding the online articles, the headline, date of publication, name of the author, captions of photos
and pictures, and links and headlines of related articles were deliberately excluded by the author, but
the subtitles and words inserted in tables and figures were included in the TXT files.
According to Uchida and Negishi (2018), CVLA assigns one of the 12 CEFR-J levels (Pre-A1 to
C2) based on four textual indexes calculated from the input text using regression models, concerning
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the characteristics of the sentence structure and vocabulary. This system is based on the Corpusbook
Corpus compiled by the CEFR-J project, which is composed of data from EFL/ESL textbooks createdunder the CEFR framework (Uchida & Negishi, 2018; Tono, 2013; Tono, 2020; Tono & Negishi, 2020).
While the aforementioned EVP devised by the English Profile only allows the user to identify the
CEFR level of the vocabulary, CVLA provides the estimated difficulty of English passages of listening
and reading materials.
Figure 1 shows the interface of CVLA. The user simply pastes a text in a space, entering thespecified password. Note that the text should not exceed 2,000 words for analysis.
Figure 1
The Interface of CVLAThe CVLA outputs the result in four types of information: (i) text with the colored CEFR-J level3
assigned to each word (see Figure 2); (ii) a table with the result of the estimated text level andscores of the four indexes (see Figure 3); (iii) a bar chart showing the proportion of CEFR-J levelsof the content words, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (see Figure 4); and (iv) a tableshowing the distribution of the raw frequencies of the content words according to the CEFR-J levels(see Figure 5).

3

EVP is used for C level words (Uchida & Negishi, 2018) as the CEFR-J Wordlist does not contain any C1 or C2 words (Tono,2020).

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Figure 2
A Sample Result of Article No. 4: A Text With the CEFR-J Level Assigned to Each Word

Figure 3
A Sample Result of Article No. 4: The Estimated Text Level and Measure of the Four Indexes

Mode: R
CEFR

ARI

VperSent

AvrDiff

BperA

A1

5.73

1.49

1.31

0.08

A2

7.03

1.82

1.41

0.12

B1

10.00

2.37

1.57

0.18

B2

12.33

2.88

1.71

0.26

Input

10.68

3.59

1.90

0.43

Estimated level

B1.2

C2

C1

C2

Estimated Text Level:C1

Figure 4
A Sample Result of Article No. 4 Selected by Student D: A Bar Chart Showing the Proportion of CEFR-J Levels of theContent Words
CEFR levels
A1

A2

B1

B2

C1

C2

NA

ALL
Noun
Verb
Adjective
Adverb
0

100

200

300

400

6

500

600

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IDENTIFYING THE CEFR-J LEVEL S OF THE REA DING TEXTS INTRODUCEDIN A COURSE FOR CURRENT ENGLISH 1 (REA DING)

Figure 5
A Sample Result of Article No. 4: The Distribution of Raw Frequencies of Content Words According to the CEFR-J Levels

POS/CEFR

A1

A2

B1

B2

C1

C2

NA

Noun

99

43

65

29

1

0

60

Verb

89

25

22

15

1

1

13

Adjective

39

24

12

7

2

2

14

Adverb

42

17

8

3

1

0

3

The estimated text level, shown below the table in Figure 3 (i.e., C1), was determined according
to the four indexes of textual features: Automated Readability Index (ARI), VperSent (i.e., verbs per
sentence), AvrDiff (i.e., the average of word difficulties), and BperA (i.e., the ratio of B-level content
words to A-level content words). The scores of the four indexes are further described in the Resultsand Discussion section.
The ARI produces an appropriate representation of the US Grade Level (from scores 1 to 14)(Wikipedia, 2018). For example, Article No. 4 selected by Student D in Figure 3 indicates a score of
10.68, which corresponds to a US Grade Level of between the 10th (aged 15 to 16) and 11th (aged 16
to 17) grade. CVLA output the estimated level as B1.2 based on the ARI measure.
The score of VperSent is the average rate of verbs contained in each sentence. A high score forthis index means that the target sentences are composed of complex constructions, such as the useof passive tense, gerund, and past particle, and that the level of the text can be lowered using simple
constructions (Uchida & Negishi, 2018). For example, Article No. 4 shows a score of 3.59, which was
assigned as C2 level.
The AvrDiff index shows the average word difficulties when content words assigned as A1 levelare given a score of 1, A2 words are given a score of 2, B1 words score 3 points, and B2 words score 4,
based on the CEFR-J Wordlist, which was created in the CEFR-J project and contains 7,815 words in4
total (Uchida & Negishi, 2018). The score of Article No. 4 was 1.9, and the estimated level was C1.
The BperA indicates the ratio of B-level content words to A-level content words, and the text levelcan be lowered using fewer B level words (Uchida & Negishi, 2018). In Figure 3, the score of Article
No. 4 was 0.43, which was assigned as C2 level.

Results and Discussion
Overall Results of the Estimated CEFR-J Levels
Of the articles in the assigned textbook, five were identified as C1 level, and four articles as
C2 level. Among the collection of online articles selected by the students, one article was assigned
as B2.2, nine as C1, and 12 as C2. Since CVLA does not accept texts exceeding 2,000 words, thearticles chosen by Students I and L in Table A2 were excluded from the analyses. Figures 6 and 7
show the indexes of ARI, VperSent, AvrDiff, and BperA, as well as the estimated CEFR-J level of the4

Words assigned as C1 or C2 level are regressively estimated.

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textbook and online articles. The number of the x-axis indicates the serial number of each article.
The scores of the CEFR-J levels were determined according to the calculations where B2.2 received
a score of 4.5, C1 scored 5, and C2 scored 6. The ARI scores in both plots fluctuate compared to theother indexes, which is likely because the index is sensitive to sentence and word lengths (Uchida
and Negishi, 2018). The ARI measures tend to correspond with the VperSent scores, especially in
Figure 6, indicating that readability could be influenced by the structures of sentences. Regarding the
AvrDiff and BperA indexes, there were no big differences among all the texts in either group.
Figure 6
Four Indexes and CEFR-J Level of the Articles in the Assigned Textbook
25

Score

20
15
10
5
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Serial Number of Text
ARI

VperSent

AvrDiff

BperA

CEFR

Figure 7
Four Indexes and CEFR-J Level of the Articles Selected by the Students
25

Score

20
15
10
5
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Serial Number of Text
ARI

VperSent

AvrDiff

BperA

CEFR

Comparing Articles No. 3 (with the headline “Virus Forcing Rethink of Japanese Way of Businessat Toyota, CEO Says” from The Japan Times, totaling 469 words) and No. 4 (with the headline “Science
Speeds Up During Coronavirus Pandemic—But at What Cost?” from CNN, totaling 1,236 words), theestimated CEFR-J levels were B2.2 for No. 3 and C1 for No. 4. The length of No. 3 was approximately

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IDENTIFYING THE CEFR-J LEVEL S OF THE REA DING TEXTS INTRODUCEDIN A COURSE FOR CURRENT ENGLISH 1 (REA DING)

2.6 times shorter than that of No. 4. However, according to the scores of VperSent and ARI, Article
No. 3 is likely to be more difficult than Article No. 4; the scores of VperSent and ARI for Article No. 3
were 4.75 and 13.4, respectively, while those of Article No. 4 were 3.59 and 10.68, respectively. In fact,
the No. 4 text was written with simpler structures than No. 3, but the content intuitively seemed much
more challenging and unfamiliar to the students than that of No. 3. The topic of No. 4 was preprint
servers, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, which was a hot topic in the news of COVID-19, while that of No.
3 was the Japanese corporate culture (e.g., genchi genbutsu, or go and see for yourself) influenced by
COVID-19.

Distribution of Vocabular y According to the CEFR-J Levels
Figures 8 and 9 show the distribution of vocabulary (i.e., content words, such as nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs) according to the CEFR-J levels of the articles in the assigned textbook andthe ones selected by the students. The ratio of A1 vocabulary was the highest, followed by A2, B1, NA(not applicable), B2, C1, and C2 in the texts in both groups. This tendency is evident in the distributionof content words in each part-of-speech category in Figures 10 and 11. Therefore, it can be assumed
that the vocabulary assigned as A1, A2, and B1 levels accounted for a major portion of the newspaper
articles in general, regardless of the length of texts.
Figure 8
Distribution of Vocabulary According to the CEFR-J Levels of the Articles in the Assigned Textbook
40%
35%
30%

29.78%
24.71%

Ratio

25%

20.07%

20%

14.93%

15%
9.78%

10%
5%

1.45%

0%

0.29%

CEFR-J levels
A1

A2

B1

B2

C1

9

C2

NA

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Figure 9Distribution of Vocabulary According to the CEFR-J Levels of the Articles Selected by the Students
40%

37.00%

35%
30%

Ratio

25%

21.40%

20%

18.30%

15%

13.19%

10%

8.34%

5%
0%

1.11%

0.67%

C1

C2

CEFR-J levels
A1

A2

B1

B2

NA

Figure 10
Distribution of Content Words (Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Adverbs) According to the CEFR-J Levels of the Articles in
the Assigned Textbook

Category

Noun

206

Verb
Adjective

172

110
59

88
55

40 24

74

154

79

17

108

30 23

69

Adverb 36 26 9
0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

Tokens
A1

A2

B1

B2

C1

C2

NA

Figure 11
Distribution of Content Words (Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Adverbs) According to the CEFR-J Levels of the Articles
Selected by the Students

Category

Noun

1803

Verb

1335

588

Adjective

617

469

Adverb639

300 130

0

1184
503

1130

504

80

908

279 246410 157 367

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

Tokens
A1

A2

B1

B2

10

C1

C2

NA

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To examine whether statistically significant differences existed between the articles in theassigned textbook and the ones selected by the students from the Internet in terms of the distributionof the CEFR-J level vocabulary in each category, chi-square tests were conducted. The results of thesetests showed that significant differences were evident in the categories of verbs (x 2 = 21.9, df = 4, p <.001, Cramer’s V = .05781) and adjectives (x 2 = 17.18, df = 4, p < .01, Cramer’s V = .06156), except for
the C1 and C2 categories, whose expected values were less than five. In terms of verbs, the ratio of A1
vocabulary was higher in the articles chosen by the students (accounting for 44.38%) than that of theassigned textbooks (33.43%), but the vocabulary assigned as A2 and B1 tended to be more frequent in
the textbook (26.75% and 22.49%, respectively) than in the articles chosen by the students (19.55% and16.72%, respectively). NA verbs appeared slightly more often in the students’ articles (8.18%) than in
the textbook (6.99%). The students’ articles also tended to contain more A1 adjectives (30.02%) than
the textbook (23.69%), but the ratio of NA adjectives in the students’ was lower (17.86%) than that of
the textbook (27.71%).
5
Finally, the most frequently appearing nouns in both groups, which tend to be topic-sensitive,
are described in relation to the assigned CEFR-J levels. The outcome derived from the Sketch Engine
indicates that the top six nouns in the assigned textbook were year (16 occurrences), China (14), ice(13), percent (13), hydrogen (13), and visitor (11). The words except for China (NA other), percent andhydrogen (NA content words) were A1 or A2 vocabulary according to CVLA. By contrast, the top sevenfrequent nouns in the students’ articles were people (119), country (73), year (70), pandemic (56),health (52), government (52), and coronavirus (50). The words except for pandemic and coronavirus(NA content words) were all assigned as A1 or A2.

Conclusion
This paper examined the validity of introducing authentic news articles selected by students
compared with texts provided in the published textbook by identifying the text levels that CVLA
assigned to them: that is, the CEFR-J levels. In the assigned textbook, the number of words in eachtext was controlled and/or articles of the same length were deliberately chosen for publication. On theother hand, as the texts selected by the students were completely authentic without any amendments
made by the teacher, the length of the texts differed greatly. It was assumed that the authentic texts,
which normally targeted advanced English-speaking readers, could have been more challenging to
the students than the controlled texts in the textbook. However, according to the results retrieved
from CVLA, most of the texts were identified as either C1 or C2 level, and the distribution of the
CEFR-J levels in the content words of both groups turned out to be very similar according to theresults shown in Figures 8 and 9. Between the texts from the assigned textbook and the authentic
articles selected by the students, statistically significant differences were only observed in the ratio ofverbs and adjectives except for the C1 and C2 vocabulary. The proportion of A1 verbs and adjectives
tended to be higher in the authentic articles than in the textbook, as Figures 10 and 11 show.
In conclusion, based upon the quantitative analyses of the textual difficulties identified by CVLA,no major differences between both text groups of newspaper articles were observed in terms ofthe difficulties according to the assigned CEFR-J levels, even though the majority of the authentic
articles selected by the students were published after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and initially

5

The top three frequent verbs in both groups were be, have, and say.

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assumed to contain more NA vocabulary than the textbook articles.
From a pedagogical viewpoint, with the author having been a teacher of this course, some of the
topics of the authentic articles chosen by the students were challenging. The topic of preprint servers
was one example as discussed in the Results and Discussion section. As almost most of the articles
dealt with topics related to COVID-19, the content tended to be technical and varied, covering topics
including business, economy, politics, health care, medical treatment, education, and society, which
required certain background knowledge to have a full understanding. Nevertheless, each student
was only asked to introduce their chosen article in class, and the other students (i.e., the audience)
only needed to browse or skim the article beforehand (which was not compulsory) and to write shortcomments or state opinions on the presentations they heard afterwards. Doing so should have given
the students sufficient opportunities to become familiar with the current topics in relation to the
SDGs and the COVID-19 pandemic, and to identify their classmates’ individual interests from theirselections.
As for future pedagogical implications, teachers could instruct the students to choose articles
of a certain length that are appropriate to their proficiency levels, to ensure every student has equal
preparation time. The enrolled students in this course were initially instructed to submit a 450-word
written summary of the selected article, but a few students chose articles containing less than 450
words. Therefore, a solution was made by instructing them to add their opinions and/or refer to theirclassmates’ comments on the forum as part of their summary.
For future additional analyses, the text level of the students’ written summaries as well as theircomments on the forum could also be analyzed to examine how they managed to paraphrase theinformation given in the introduced articles in the course, which may represent a mediation aspect,
the recent addition to the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2018).

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References
Automated Readability Index. (2018, August 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.
php?title=Automated_readability_index&oldid=856199533
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多言語教育実践ジャーナル

第1巻 （JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL PEDAGOGY AND PRACTICE, VOL. 1）

Appendix
Table A1
Articles from the Assigned Textbook
Unit

Specified
SourceHeadline

Token

Date of
Publication

1

Jiji

Japanese companies in rural areas facing difficultyin hiring graduates

283

January 13,
2019

2

N/A

Foreign visitors go on record shopping spree

278

January 18,
2019

3

N/A

Niigata rice exports to China start

291

January 9,
2019

4

AFP-Jiji

India plans manned space mission by 2021

309

January 13,
2019

5

AFP-Jiji

Saudi teenager ‘under the care’ of U.N. agency

316

January 8,
2019

6

AP

Shenzhen switches to electric cars

325

January 9,
2019

7

N/A

Frog calls may help improve telecom technology

239

January 9,
2019

8

N/A

Japan to power fishing boats with Toyota’shydrogen fuel cells

346

January 4,
2019

9

N/A

Study: Greenland ice melting four-fold faster thandecade ago

355

January 26,
2019

Table A2
Articles Selected by the Students
Student

ArticleNo.

SourceHeadline

Token

Date of
Publication

A

1

The JapanTimes

LDP panel considering five-year transition
plan for September school year start421

May 19,
2020

B

2

CNN

Cats can infect other cats with coronavirus,
researchers find477

May 13,2020

C

3The Japan
Times

Virus forcing rethink of Japanese way ofbusiness at Toyota, CEO says

469

May 31,
2020

D

4

CNN

Science speeds up during coronavirus
pandemic—but at what cost?

1,236

May 15,
2020

E

5

CNN

Hungarian leader’s outrageous power grab

1,006

April 3,
2020

F

6

The Japan
Times

COVID-19 crisis takes toll on children’s
cafeterias for disadvantaged

1,092

May 8,
2020

14

IDENTIFYING THE CEFR-J LEVEL S OF THE REA DING TEXTS INTRODUCEDIN A COURSE FOR CURRENT ENGLISH 1 (REA DING)

Student

ArticleNo.

SourceHeadline

Token

Date of
Publication

G

7

CNN

Climate change and coronavirus: Fivecharts about the biggest carbon crash

1,664

May 5,
2020

H

8

The Japan
Times

Europe’s broken tourism industry struggles
to save the summer

1,017

May 16,
2020

I

N/A

Quarts

The coronavirus pandemic is reshaping
education

Exceeding
2,000

March 30,
2020

J

9

Time

How South Korea’s nightclub outbreakis shining an unwelcome spotlight on the
LGBTQ community

1,346

May 14,
2020

K

10

The ASEAN
Post

Hate and discrimination in a pandemic
world

1,276

May 12,
2020

L

N/A

Daily Mail

More evidence emerges that smokers areprotected from coronavirus

Exceeding
2,000

May 11,
2020

M

11

CNN

Coronavirus is causing a flurry of plastic
waste. Campaigners fear it may be permanent

1,184

May 4,
2020

N

12

The Japan
Times

COVID-19 versus Japan’s culture ofcollectivism

856

May 4,2020

O

13

UN News

UN leads call to protect most vulnerablefrom mental health crisis during and after
COVID-19

1,299

May 14,
2020

P

14

National
Geographic

Kids are having pandemic dreams too

1,067

May 11,
2020

Q

15

CNBC

No lockdown here: Sweden defends its
more relaxed coronavirus strategy

1,113

March 30,
2020

R

16

NHK

Coronavirus hits Rohingya refugee camp

445

June 4,
2020

S

17

The Japan
Times

Abuses still abound in labor-strapped
Japan’s foreign ‘trainee’ worker system

1,075

January 2,
2018

T

18

BBC

Coronavirus: How New Zealand relied on
science and empathy

1,381

April 20,
2020

U

19

National
Geographic

Your daily commute won’t ever be the
same

1,466

May 11,
2020

V

20

BBC

How coronavirus is driving a revolution in
travel983

May 16,
2020

W

21

BBC

Coronavirus: Will we ever shake hands
again?

1,594

May 6,
2020

X

22

National
Geographic

Education interrupted. Years lost. Students
face ‘cruelty’ of new visa policy

1,369

July 19,2020

15