Abstract
This study aims to analyze vocabulary items in the eighth grade English coursebooks used in Turkey and to compare their frequencies with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), British National Corpus (BNC), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and Academic Word List (AWL). Additionally, we extracted the most frequent 50 verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The results revealed that the most frequent verbs were do, is are; the most frequent adjectives were correct, short, natural, great, good, new, social, first, favorite and the most frequent adverbs were then, really, there, here, very, always, too, well, more, usually and often. Touchstone 2 mostly corresponded to the CEFR A2 level, BNC’s and COCA’s first 2000 lists, while others had less satisfactory inclusion percentages. When we compared the coursebooks with AWL, Upswing English had the highest inclusion percentages. Although Touchstone 2 seems to have the highest inclusion percentages, all coursebooks should consider this study’s results to revise their vocabulary selection.
Highlights
English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks are major input source for students to learn vocabulary items (Jordan & Gray, 2019)
This study aims to analyze vocabulary items in the eighth grade English coursebooks used in Turkey and to compare their frequencies with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), British National Corpus (BNC), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and Academic Word List (AWL)
The current study differs from the previous studies in terms of the grade (8th grade), level of the textbook (A2 level), corpus, and word lists (COCA, BNC, AWL, and English Vocabulary Profile (EVP))
Summary
English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks are major input source for students to learn vocabulary items (Jordan & Gray, 2019). In the countries (e.g., Turkey) where the mother tongue is not English, and the chance to use the target language in daily life is low, coursebooks constitute the primary source for effective language teaching (Kayaoğlu, 2011). Coursebooks have an important place due to their extensive use in language teaching (Turanlı, 2004), and it is necessary to aptly select the vocabulary items that have the utmost importance for students (Sun & Dang, 2020). Compared to the previous studies, since relatively few studies examine and compare English coursebooks based on a corpus, this study is expected to contribute to the English language teaching field by presenting some implications on vocabulary selection to curriculum and materials designers, teachers, and students
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