A Corpus-based Analysis of Curriculum-based Elementary and Secondary English Textbooks

Abstract

Current research on curriculum-based textbooks indicates that there is a lack of comprehensive corpus-based studies of textbooks in the Korean EFL context. This recognition prompted us to investigate the vocabulary levels of elementary and secondary curriculum-based English textbooks. A corpus of 5,628,795 running words from a total of 140 different textbooks with the inclusion of the activity books was compiled for analysis. The operational measures for comparison involved the 2,000 General Service List(GSL), the 570 Academic Word List(AWL), the British National Corpus, the Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English, and the Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English. Our results indicated that 68% of the textbook words were beyond the 2,570 word level (i.e., total of word families of the GSL & AWL). Further corpus-based analysis indicated that textbooks of secondary schools presented word lists as large as 7,430 words compared to the 3,000 words that are permitted at the high school level by the National Curriculum. In the second part of the study, views and opinions of 600 stakeholders (i.e., learners, teachers, and experts) on a revision of the Basic Word List of the National Curriculum are presented. The results provide implications for the development of a revised Basic Word List.