Teaching English High-Frequency Verbs in Textbooks

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the role of textbooks in the acquisition of English high-frequency verbs by Korean EFL learners by comparing the current secondary school English textbooks with native speaker corpora. It is assumed that there are two general principles in selecting and grading teaching items in textbooks when teaching vocabulary: (a) the Frequency Principle and (b) the Complexity Principle. These principles say that textbook writers should consider the frequency of a given word and the complexity of its meanings in deciding when and how to include it in a textbook. This paper examines the extent to which these principles are observed with regard to high-frequency verbs in 44 randomly chosen textbooks, from the 7th to 10th grade, in comparison with two native speaker corpora, the British National Corpus (BNC) and Longman Spoken and Written English (LSWE) Corpus. Furthermore, it examines writings by first-year college students in order to confirm the effect of the textbooks they had been exposed to. The results show that textbooks are largely similar to native speaker corpora in the frequency of basic verbs and the distribution of their meanings. However, there is still much room for improvement. This paper further suggests that corpus-based textbook writing and classroom teaching should be implemented as a way of helping learners to acquire real language use.