A Corpus-based Analysis of Collocations in Tenth Grade High School English Textbooks

Abstract

Increased corpus-based language studies have resulted in research on individual words in textbooks, but these teaching materials have not been extensively analyzed on the type and frequency of collocations. Previous research has been limited to studying certain parts of textbooks or specific types of collocations. By analyzing 16 Common English I High School textbooks of English (1,441,402 running words), 852 lexical collocations were extracted with the 41 most frequent content words used as nodes. For detailed analysis, 50 high-frequency lexical collocations were compared to collocations in the 2k Graded Reader native-speaker corpus for their frequencies and usages. Collocations that are closely related to learners` real life and interest (e.g., volunteer work, good grade, fast food) were found while the number of collocations combined with adverbs was relatively small comprising only 41 out of 852 collocations (less than 5%). The comparison of the fifty most frequent collocations in the textbook with the 2k Graded Reader native-speaker corpus produced considerable differences. The results suggest that a variety of high-frequency collocations from native-speaker corpus need to be given thought in the process of materials development. The study suggests contrastive instruction for teaching collocations to L2 learners.