The "News Web Easy" news service as a resource for teaching and learning Japanese: An assessment of the comprehension difficulty of Japanese sentence-end expressions

Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, NHK, launched “News Web Easy” in April 2012 1. It provides users with five simplified news scripts (easy Japanese news) on a daily basis. This web service provides users with five daily simplified news scripts of “easy” Japanese news. Since its inception, this service has been favorably received both in Japan and overseas. Users particularly appreciate its value as a Japanese learning and teaching resource. In this paper, we discuss this service and its possible contribution to language education. We focus on difficulty levels of sentence-end expressions, compiled from the news, that create ambiguity and problems when rewriting news items. These are analyzed and compared within regular news and News Web Easy, and their difficulty is assessed based on Japanese learners’ reading comprehension levels. Our results revealed that current rewriting of sentence-end expressions in News Web Easy is appropriate. We further identified features of these expressions that contribute to difficulty in comprehension.