Abstract
Textbooks are an important source of knowledge input on which the transmission of academic knowledge often relies, especially in the early stages of academic learning. Adopting a corpus-based approach, this study evaluates the text difficulty of science textbooks used in secondary English-medium instruction schools in Hong Kong, with a focus on their lexical coverage and readability. It compares the English language used in English-medium science textbooks with that in English as a foreign language textbooks. The analysis reveals that the text difficulty of the English-medium science textbooks is inappropriate in terms of the coverage of academic words and the readability level. The results also show that the coverage of words from the Academic Word List (AWL) and the General Service List (GSL) as well as the text readability levels, vary across scientific topics. These findings will inform textbook design and the development of pedagogical strategies to facilitate students’ learning of subject content in the medium of English.
Highlights
Reading in a foreign language presents learners with multiple challenges, such as unknown syntactic features and unfamiliar meanings of particular vocabulary
Learning materials for learners for whom English is a foreign language and who are in the early stage of academic learning attract particular attention, since it is assumed that textbooks are extremely important learning resources at the initial stage of academic learning (Wood & Appel, 2014)
Our study shifted the focus from the language used in university textbooks to that used in secondary school textbooks, to further enrich our understanding of the text difficulty posed by English-medium textbooks used in secondary English-medium instruction (EMI) schools
Summary
Reading in a foreign language presents learners with multiple challenges, such as unknown syntactic features and unfamiliar meanings of particular vocabulary. Concerning the possible challenges these students may have, a number of studies have been conducted to examine their academic performance, and these have reported that academic achievements may be undermined by the reading challenge (Lo & Lo, 2014; Roussel et al, 2017) In response to these challenges, attempts have been made to improve pedagogical practice in English-medium instruction (EMI) contexts (e.g., Hu & Gao, 2021; Lo & Macaro, 2012), and to promote self-regulated learning strategies to facilitate students’ learning of subject content through the medium of English (Hu & Gao, 2018b, 2020; Jaekel, 2020; Mahboob, 2014). Since textbooks are considered an important source of knowledge input (Harwood, 2005), and the transmission of academic content knowledge relies on the language used (Lorenzo, 2017), it is necessary to explore whether textbooks can function as appropriate pedagogical resources in supporting the learning of EMI academic subjects
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