An investigation into the star-rated words in English-Japanese learner's dictionaries

Most English-Japanese learner's dictionaries indicate the importance and vocabulary level of specific entries by attaching one, two, or three stars to each word. Using one monolingual (COBUILD) and four bilingual (Genius, Lexis, Wisdom, and Progressive) learner's dictionaries, the researchers compared the star-rated words with (a) junior/senior high school (JSH) vocabulary to determine denotation validity, (b) high frequency words in the British National Corpus to assess similarity to present-day English, and (c) other materials such as university exams, TOEIC tests, magazines and news broadcasts. Findings show minimal consistency in the selection of star-rated words between the examined dictionaries, and although generally very useful, a large percentage of the JSH level vocabulary found in the dictionaries might not be taught in junior and senior high school textbooks in Japan.