A Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Complexities: A Case Study of English Textbooks of Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education Islamabad, Pakistan

Abstract

This study aims at exploring linguistic complexity of the English Text Books prescribed by the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education Islamabad, Pakistan, for intermediate classes. For the last two decades, the concept of linguistic complexity has appealed interest of the linguists and other researchers to investigate this phenomenon. There are several factors that influence linguistic complexity to a tex. The importance of a text in the process of teaching and learning is beyond any doubt, and this significance enhances in the context of the third world countries where teaching and learning is considered almost impossible in absence of textbooks. In this environment selection of a textbook without gauging its linguistic complexity and grammatical intricacy is vulnerable. Two textbooks, Text- A, for first year class, and Text- B, for second year class, were chosen as samples purposefully. To build the edifice of this research Halliday and Ure’s lexical density and grammatical intricacy methods were used. The findings reveal that the actual text of Text- A falls in the slab of the more linguistic complexity with an index of 5.1 and Text- B which falls in the category of simple texts with an average index of 4.6, as Halliday and Ure’s methods suggest. This paper concludes with recommendations that text book writers and the textbook designers must familiar with th phenomenon of linguistic complexity and grammatical density and before prescribing any text to the ultimate learners, the textbook must be examined and evaluated to measure linguistic complexity