A corpus-based comparative analysis of elementary school English textbooks in South Korea and China

Abstract

The present study aims to provide implications applicable to Korean English education by comparing Korean and Chinese elementary school English textbooks. Five types of Korean elementary school English textbooks and three types of Chinese elementary school English textbooks for 6th grade were constructed as a corpus. To find out how Korean and Chinese elementary English textbooks differs from English corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) were selected. The study results are as follows. First, in terms of vocabulary characteristics, Chinese textbooks had higher lexical diversity and used more familiar, concrete and emotional vocabulary. Second, in terms of sentence and discourse characteristics, as the esult of the average sentence length, syntactic complexity of the sentence, readability index, cohesion analysis, text difficulty of Chinese textbooks was higher. Third, although the high-frequency vocabulary of Korean and Chinese English textbooks was generally similar, there was a difference in that first and second person pronouns are used more frequently and the conjunction ‘and’ is used less frequently in Korean textbooks. As a result of comparison with the English corpus, the high-frequency vocabulary of Korean and Chinese textbooks was more similar to the children’s corpus rather than the general corpus.