Analysis of picture book vocabulary and sentence complexity based on the 2015 revised national English curriculum

Abstract

This study explores the possibility of using English picture books to supplement the English input in primary English education. To this end, a corpus of 107 popular English picture books was constructed and analyzed in the context of the revised national English curriculum of 2015. Vocabulary in the corpus was compared with the basic vocabulary lists of the national curriculum, and the syntactic complexity of sentences in the picture books was compared with the syntactic complexity of the example sentences of elementary-level language forms in the national curriculum. The results show that the vocabulary and syntactic complexity of picture books of ATOS book level 0-2 are generally suitable for elementary school students. Lexical analyses also reveal that picture books contain exclamations, onomatopoeia, colloquialisms, and words that children can relate to their everyday life, which are likely to function as authentic input in primary English education.