it is difﬁ cult for me to cook a meal” – a provisional...

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In my English Teaching Methodology class（英語科教育法）students have recently been engaged in a third round of practice teaching (“micro-teach-ing”) when they team taught a twenty-minute sec-tion of a junior high school English lesson they had prepared. The aim of micro-teaching is to give these third-year university students experience in plan-ning and delivering classes in advance of the for-mally assessed teaching practice（教育実習）they will do next year. This time the practice teaching lesson was based on Unit 4 of New Horizon Book 3, a popular Ministry of Education, Science and Tech-nology (MEXT) approved English textbook. The unit is entitled “Learn by losing”. As with most of the textbooks used in junior high schools, grammat-ical structures feature prominently on the pages of Unit 4 and, quite by chance, one of the student pairs in the micro-teaching chose to present the structure “It is diffi cult for me to…” which appears on page 45. When one of the student-teachers elicited from one of their classmates the sentence “It is diffi cult for me to cook a meal”, an alarm bell rang in my head and I started to investigate the status of this structure. The results of that investigation are pre-sented in this paper together with consideration of

the wider issues of textbook quality.Publishers who produce school textbooks in Ja-

pan need to have their books approved by MEXT before they can be sold to schools. The textbooks need to adhere to a syllabus designed by the Minis-try and, in the case of English textbooks, this means including the grammar structures stipulated in the Course of Study（学習指導要領）. Vocabulary is less closely prescribed, but 1,200 words are to be taught in the three years of junior high school and there tends to be a good deal of agreement between textbooks on those 1,200 words. The Course of Study is also expansive about the need for teachers to teach as much as possible in English, to develop the students’ communicative abilities, and to spread teaching across the four macro-skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing. Reading the Course of Study, one is struck by the ambitious goals that have been set and the high expectations there are of teachers and learners to aspire to use English as a communication tool and to understand foreign cul-tures.

By contrast, when one opens a typical junior high school textbook, one is often struck by the limited,

※ Professor, Faculty of Global Media Studies, Komazawa University

“It is diffi cult for me to cook a meal” – A provisional investigation into

the reliability of one structure presented in approved English junior high

school textbooks

Tim Ashwell※Abstract

In this paper, a structure which appears in all MEXT-approved junior high school English textbooks, “It

+ be + ~ diffi cult for me to…”, is investigated to see whether it can be used as generatively as textbook

writers seem to assume. The paper fi rst discusses general issues relating to the assessment of textbook

English before presenting the results of a brief investigation into this specifi c structure. It was found

that, while the structure appears to be relatively common in modern British English, there appear to be

constraints on the type of verb which can occur in the infi nitive clause. It is suggested that textbook writers

and syllabus designers should take care to check the usage of structures if they wish to take native-speaker

norms as their benchmark.

Journal of Global Media Studies Vol. 17·18

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pedestrian nature of the materials and the strange-ness of the English used. Disembodied dialogues present awkward interchanges between wooden characters; texts strain to include target structures which would not normally sit side by side; role-plays give students little freedom to express any-thing beyond mundane commonplaces; grammar structures and new words vie for space with topical content. Above all, one is struck by the strangeness of the language they present to the extent that one wonders whether anyone has seriously challenged the reliability of the English they contain. One is left with a strong impression that textbook produc-ers and MEXT syllabus writers have very different agendas and are possibly pandering to different au-diences.

One has to be careful, however, not to criticize textbooks too readily. After all, those for the fi rst two years of instruction in junior high school are el-ementary level texts and textbook writers are work-ing with a relatively restricted range of vocabulary and grammar structures. With such limited resourc-es, it is perhaps understandable that dialogues can seem stilted. It is also vital that we consider the cri-teria by which we judge the English we fi nd in text-books. We have to question whether native-speaker intuitions should be respected or whether an alterna-tive set of norms should be employed. Should we, for example, take a less stringent stance and decide that, so long as the English is intelligible, it should be accepted, or that, so long as it conforms to an agreed standard of Japanese English, it should be accepted? Is it possible to take intercultural com-municative competence as the norm (Alptekin, 2002), or do we, in fact, default to native-speaker norms and insist that textbook English conforms to these rules? These might include not only native speaker intuitions about grammaticality but also all the pragmatic constraints a native-speaker sociolin-guistic competence imposes, as well as knowledge about actual usage.

One way to decide on the norms for textbook English is to ask students and teachers what kind of English they are aspiring towards. Timmis (2002)

did exactly this by using carefully designed ques-tionnaires for both student and teacher respondents. Based on the responses of 400 students from 14 different countries and 180 teachers from 45 differ-ent countries, Timmis concluded that “There is still some desire among students to conform to native-speaker norms, and this desire is not necessarily restricted to those students who use, or anticipate using English primarily with native-speakers” (p. 248). He also notes that “Teachers seem to be mov-ing away from native-speaker norms faster than students are” (p. 248). One suspects, therefore, that even in 2015, many students will still feel they want to aspire towards using English which is based on native-speaker norms.

The quality of the language in Ministry-approved textbooks matters because these books have a spe-cial sanctioned status and also because, very often, the textbook is the main resource many JHS teach-ers have to rely on. Textbooks embody the lore that has to be taught and are seen by many teachers as the full extent of the body of knowledge they need to convey to their students. Teachers’ guides may help and, of course, teachers have their own L2 competence to fall back on, but for many teach-ers the English in the textbook is the standard, the model sanctioned by the Ministry, and it simply has to be adhered to. It is therefore vitally important that textbook writers provide a model of English in their textbooks which will enable teachers and students to acquire English which will allow them to com-municate successfully with other English users.

Literature review

MEXT-approved textbooks have been analysed in a number of ways, but assessments of the English they contain are not as common as one might ex-pect. Nguyen & Ishitobi (2012) compared the dia-logues presented in three JHS and one senior high school textbook with those in real life service en-counters and found considerable differences in the sequencing and completeness of actions. This lack of authenticity is not limited, however, to MEXT-approved textbooks. Gilmore (2004) concludes that

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“It is diffi cult for me to cook a meal” ‒ A provisional investigation into the reliability of one structure presented in approved English junior high school textbooks (T. Ashwell)

dialogues in textbooks published by Oxford Univer-sity Press, Cambridge University Press and Long-man suffer from similar problems and fail to display aspects of spoken grammar (Carter and McCarthy, 1997). Weir and Ozasa (2007) attempted to estimate the naturalness of the English in Japanese English textbooks by using the distribution of parts-of-speech in textbooks and comparing this to the dis-tribution of parts-of-speech in two large online na-tive speaker corpora. They concluded that the three textbook series they analyzed attained a dimension of English naturalness. However, “naturalness” was defi ned solely on the basis of the proportions of dif-ferent parts-of-speech found in the textbooks and corpora. Shimizu (2014) looked at collocations be-tween the verb “make” and a noun in seven MEXT-approved textbooks and compared these instances with those in corpora of native-speaker English. She discovered that the collocations used in textbooks were not representative of those most commonly found in the corpora.

It is therefore not unreasonable to say that the language of MEXT-approved textbooks has been found to be inauthentic, of limited naturalness, and collocationally unrepresentative when compared with native-speaker norms. It is a little surprising, however, that, despite this interest in the English in textbooks, the grammar structures used have appar-ently not been investigated.

Investigating “It + be + ~ diffi cult for me to…”

One grammar structure that appears in the MEXT syllabus （学習指導要領） is: “It + be + ~ Ad-jective for someone to Verb…”. It is presented in New Horizon Book 3 Unit 4 as one of a number of patterns using an infi nitive clause. Other patterns include the use of the infi nitive to express purpose (e. g. I got up early to study English yesterday); as the complement of “want” and “like” (e. g. I want to play basketball); performing an adjectival function (e. g. I want something to eat); and as the comple-ment of the verb “know” (e. g. I know how to use the Internet).

Examples of the structure presented in New Ho-rizon Book 3 Unit 4 are shown in Figure 1. These examples led my students to believe that they could elicit the sentence “It is diffi cult for me to cook a meal” from a classmate acting as a junior high school student in a micro-teaching lesson. There ap-pear to be no issues with the grammaticality of this sentence, but there are issues to do with the natural-ness. One wonders when, where, why, and, indeed, whether some of these sentences would ever actu-ally be uttered by native-speakers.

• It is diffi cult for me to explain sumo.• It is easy for Kate to speak Japanese.• It is important for us to learn about other cultures.• It’s easy / hard for me to get up early / write letters /

remember names / cook a meal / read a map / sing a song / use a computer.

• It was not easy for them to learn Japanese.• It’s diffi cult for me to understand the rules.

Figure 1. Examples of the structure “It + be + ~ Ad-jective for someone to Verb…” appearing in New Ho-

rizon Book 3 Unit 4.

In order to investigate the structure more I looked at examples from the British National Corpus (BNC). The public interface for BNC allows any user to search the database and returns a maximum of 50 “solutions” chosen randomly from the total found in the database for any one query. With my fi rst query I cast the net wide and searched for the string “diffi cult for me”. This search found a total of 93 solutions from a database containing nearly 100 million words. It is fair to say therefore that “diffi cult for me” is not unusual in modern British English. However, by arranging the 50 randomly selected items from the 93 in certain ways, it be-came possible to identify certain common colloca-tions and patterns of use.

Table 1 presents the 50 randomly selected BNC items for “diffi cult for me” arranged in alphabetical order by the word preceding “diffi cult”. The pattern “it is/it’s diffi cult for me to” occurs 7 times (Items: 8, 9, 10, 12, 18, 19, 21), the pattern “it is/it’s [intensi-fi er] diffi cult for me to” occurs 2 times (Items: 39,


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Table 1. 50 randomly selected BNC items from the 93 found for “diffi cult for me” arranged in alphabetical order by the word preceding “diffi cult”

Item BNC ID x-2/3/4 x-1 x x+1/2/3

1 J9U 855 er it is a diffi cult for me because I don't2 JSF 299 It would be diffi cult for me to have to3 JJ8 732 that problem's always been diffi cult for me , you know what4 KB1 1365 might be a bit diffi cult for me.5 HLW 145 like us because er, diffi cult for me to say so6 B19 1066 It was extremely diffi cult for me to write down7 G1Y 504 would have proved extremely diffi cult for me to fi nd,8 A6R 220 and it is diffi cult for me to comment.9 FYX 536 because it is diffi cult for me to write them10 FYX 558 It is diffi cult for me to be sure11 J8B 1081 which is diffi cult for me with my12 K5H 2512 It is diffi cult for me to comment.13 K97 14322 although it is diffi cult for me with the customers14 BP1 1522 ‘You make it diffi cult for me to leave.15 CBC 12227 have also made it diffi cult for me, but the world16 J17 1409 in Oxford made it diffi cult for me get up to17 G3G 186 But it made things diffi cult for me , at times.18 FMP 293 Well it's diffi cult for me to say because19 J1H 2538 this season, so it's diffi cult for me to judge, but20 J3S 19 It's diffi cult for me , yes.21 KRL 5134 Well it's diffi cult for me to say.22 K97 662 my performances because that's diffi cult for me when directing,’ explained23 CF4 803 it so much more diffi cult for me to understand myself.24 ACA 991 ‘Nothing was more diffi cult for me in childhood than25 H83 1374 It's a bit more diffi cult for me now, because26 HYV 30 it makes it quite diffi cult for me to see some27 KRE 256 would have been quite diffi cult for me to have met28 A0F 1774 ‘This is all rather diffi cult for me,’ I said.29 A0F 2449 ‘That's rather diffi cult for me to explain.’30 G4 S79 it was really diffi cult for me to tolerate that31 FYX 397 until it became too diffi cult for me to manage the32 C9K 731 anything that's too diffi cult for me, ever!33 FBE 1572 it is too diffi cult for me , and I wish34 GV7 728 ‘This is too diffi cult for me , Poole,’ said the35 JYE 4671 that you consider too diffi cult for me?36 CH3 3029 going to be very diffi cult for me to pick him.37 ANY 504 It makes life very diffi cult for me.’38 CKM 463 It was very diffi cult for me.39 GW2 3421 sir, it is very diffi cult for me to judge,’ she40 HHX 12326 that makes it very diffi cult for me to go along41 HUV 163 letter words is very diffi cult for me to keep42 J3P 291 it makes it very diffi cult for me to , I'm not43 JK1 465 It would be very diffi cult for me.44 K52 2852 It's very diffi cult for me to summarise a45 A70 866 ‘It was diffi cult for me when I went46 FAT 2460 It was diffi cult for me to put myself47 AN1 388 The case was diffi cult for me, but other symptoms48 CF4 868 Reading was diffi cult for me , especially when49 G13 1505 it was diffi cult for me to accept.50 EF1 2196 It wasn't diffi cult for me to fi t in

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44), the pattern “it was/wasn’t diffi cult for me to” occurs 3 times (Items: 46, 49, 50), and the pattern “it was/wasn’t [intensifi er] diffi cult for me to” oc-curs 2 times (Items: 6, 30). Thus, in 14 out of the 50 random occurrences, “diffi cult for me” appears as part of the pattern presented in the textbook allow-ing for only slight variation in the tense of the verb (is/was) and the insertion of an intensifi er before “diffi cult”. It is therefore reasonable to estimate that in approximately 28% of cases in which “diffi cult for me” is used in modern British English, it appears as part of the pattern “it is diffi cult for me to”. It is also apparent from the arrangement in Table 1 that intensifi ers are frequently used before “diffi cult” in-cluding within the pattern “it is diffi cult for me to”.

When the 50 randomly selected items were ar-ranged by the word following “me”, there were 27 examples of infi nitive clauses beginning with “to”. However, limiting the discussion to the 14 examples found above that conform closely to the pattern “It is/was/wasn’t [+/- Intensifi er] + diffi cult for me to”, certain things become apparent about the nature of the verb in the infi nitive clause. These 14 examples are presented in Table 2.

Focusing this time on the verbs in the infi nitive clause following “diffi cult for me”, it can be seen from Table 2 that the verbs comment, judge, and say each occur twice and that in these cases comment

and say are being used with the meaning “judge”. It therefore seems likely that the pattern “It is diffi cult for me to” is frequently used in situations where the speaker is judging someone or something.

Discussion

This brief investigation has revealed several im-portant features regarding the use of the structure “It is diffi cult for me to”. Firstly, it shows that the struc-ture is relatively common in modern British English given minor alterations in the tense of the verb to be and the insertion of an intensifi er before “diffi -cult”. In fact, with other slight variations such as “This is” rather than “It is” and “It makes it diffi cult” instead of “It is diffi cult”, the structure can be said to be fairly common. This investigation is limited to the use of “diffi cult”; other adjectives like easy and hard also quite commonly appear in this structure. A second feature that became clear was the use of an intensifi er before the adjective, “diffi cult”.

However, perhaps the main fi nding was that only a limited range of verbs are possible in the infi nitive clause following “diffi cult”. It was apparent that the verbs used in the infi nitive clause were not common action verbs like cook, get up, sing, or use as seen in the textbook. Rather the verbs used often had the core meaning of “judge” (e. g. judge, comment and say). In addition, one might add that be sure, ac-

Table 2. 14 examples of “it is/was/wasn’t [+/- Intensifi er] + diffi cult for me to” from the BNC

Item BNC ID x-2/3/4 x-1 x x+1/2/3

1 G13 1505 it was diffi cult for me to accept.2 FYX 558 It is diffi cult for me to be sure3 A6R 220 and it is diffi cult for me to comment.4 K5H 2512 It is diffi cult for me to comment.5 EF1 2196 It wasn't diffi cult for me to fi t in6 J1H 2538 this season, so it's diffi cult for me to judge, but7 GW2 3421 sir, it is very diffi cult for me to judge,’ she8 FAT 2460 It was diffi cult for me to put myself9 FMP 293 Well it's diffi cult for me to say because10 KRL 5134 Well it's diffi cult for me to say.11 K52 2852 It's very diffi cult for me to summarise a12 G4 S79 it was really diffi cult for me to tolerate that13 B19 1066 It was extremely diffi cult for me to write down14 FYX 536 because it is diffi cult for me to write them


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cept and tolerate in the above examples also shared this meaning of judging. By checking the following discourse in the BNC examples, it seems possible to suggest that this structure is often used pre-emptive-ly to make the judgement that is passed afterwards less direct and personal. It therefore often performs a quite specifi c discoursal function and appears not to be used in free association with any verb in the infi nitive clause. This is why the sentence “It is dif-fi cult for me to cook a meal” sounds strange. The verb “cook” is not a judging verb and the sentence is not being used to pre-empt a judgement.

It appears that textbook writers have misunder-stood the extent to which this structure is used gen-eratively. They have assumed that any verb can be placed in the infi nitive clause when it seems that native-speakers only use a limited range of verbs with a specifi c meaning. They have also failed to recognize the way in which the structure is used dis-coursally to pre-empt a judgement.

One wonders what meaning the textbook writers were hoping students would be able to convey by using this structure in free association. Could “It is diffi cult for me to cook a meal” more naturally be rendered as “I am not very good at cooking” or “I fi nd it diffi cult to cook a meal”? Were syllabus de-velopers and textbook writers perhaps infl uenced by L1 Japanese factors when they included this struc-ture in the syllabus and consequently in all text-books? One can further conjecture whether there might, in fact, be a deeper problem connected to the use of syntactic expletive structures (e. g. It is…) in which English uses a dummy pronoun (e. g. it), especially when it is possible to express the fact that the agent is the fi rst person through the addition of “for me”. The Cobuild Grammar suggests that this structure is used when we want to comment about something, but this seems a very vague explanation. The exact function of such structures in which the subject is raised needs a great deal more investiga-tion.

Conclusion

McGrath (2002) notes that numerous checklists have been developed for the systematic evaluation of coursebooks, but there is a degree of consensus concerning the broad areas which should be fo-cused on. Apart from the design and subject mat-ter, language content is one of these broad areas. It seems strange therefore that the English contained in MEXT-approved textbooks has apparently not been scrutinized as closely as it should. This inves-tigation has only scratched the surface by looking closely at only one grammar structure contained in all MEXT-approved JHS textbooks. It seems likely that other structures require similar close scrutiny so that suggestions for improvement can be made. In addition, the vocabulary of textbooks would also seem to require a similar close appraisal to see whether words are, in fact, being used in their most common and most useful collocations. There is therefore plenty more to look into. Over the coming years I would like to contribute to the debate about JHS textbooks and to try to help trainee teachers, syllabus developers and textbook writers improve on the kind of English they present to young Japa-nese learners.

References

Alptekin, C. (2002). Towards intercultural communica-tive competence in ELT. ELT Journal, 56/1: 57-64.

Carter, R. & McCarthy, M. (1997). Exploring Spoken

English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Collins Cobuild, Sinclair, J. W., Fox, G. & Bullon, S.

(2002). Collins Cobuild English Grammar. London: Harper Collins.

Gilmore, A. (2004). A comparison of textbook and au-thentic interactions. ELT Journal, 58/4: 363-374.

McGrath. I. (2002). Materials Evaluation and Design

for Language Teaching. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Nguyen, H. T. & Ishitobi, N. (2012). Ordering fast food:

Service encounters in real-life interaction and in text-book dialogs. JALT Journal 34/2: 151-185.

Shimizu, M. (2014). Quantifi cation of “make” colloca-tions in high school English course textbooks.

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In P. Clements, A. Krause, & H. Brown (Eds.), JALT2014 Conference Proceedings (pp. 344-354). Tokyo: JALT.

Timmis, I. (2002). Native-speaker norms and Interna-tional English: a classroom view. ELT Journal, 56/3: 240-249.

Weir, G. R. S. & Ozasa, T. (2007). Estimating natural-ness in Japanese English textbooks. In Proceedings of PAAL 2007 (pp. 130-134). Tokyo: Pan-Pacifi c As-sociation of Applied Linguistics.

Note:

The British National Corpus public interface can be found at: <http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/>.

it is difﬁ cult for me to cook a meal” – a provisional...

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