An exploration into using multi-cultural English picture books in primary English textbooks centered around vocabulary and communicative functions

Abstract

This study explores using multi-cultural English picture books in the context of the primary English national curriculum based on the common vocabulary and communicative functions between picture books and English textbooks. For this purpose, two corpora were built by digitizing elementary English textbooks and 12 multi-cultural English picture books. AntConc, which is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis, was utilized to analyze the corpora for the comparative overlap between English textbooks and English picture books. The findings are as follows. First, common vocabulary was lower than 50 percent between the two corpora for frequently occurring content words. Second, 640 communicative functions between the two corpora were shared in seven classified functions of the national curriculum: 161 functions for third grade, 288 functions for fourth grade, 409 functions for fifth grade, and 264 functions for sixth grade. The corpora of multi-cultural picture books showed promising features of using communicative functions in different cultural contexts.