The Authenticity of English Maximizers in High School English Textbooks: The Cases of absolutely, totally, utterly, completely and entirely

Abstract

“The Authenticity of English Maximizers in High School English Textbooks: The Cases of absolutely, totally, utterly, completely and entirely.” Studies on English Language & Literature. 36.1(2010): 219-244. The present corpus study discusses the English maximizers such as absolutely, totally, utterly, completely and entirely. The analysis is conducted by using one American authentic corpus and Korean English Textbook corpus in order to make a comparison of the genuine usage and teaching materials. The general framework is provided by a group of researchers (Biber & Reppen 2002; Carter 1998; Hill 1999; Holmes 1998; O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter 2007; Ward 2000) who assert that English learning should be based on naturally occurring genuine data. The American National Corpus (ANC) was selected for the present study to examine the natural usage of the target words and scripted dialogues extracted from several Korean English textbooks were compiled together to make textbook data. Results from the analysis show that there are discrepancies between corpus data and textbook data in terms of frequency, collocation pattern and semantic prosody. We have seen that the spoken ANC has by far emphasized the negative semantic prosody(64.22%) of completely with its co-usage with negative predicates such as blocked, out, wrong, unrelated, lost, forgot and abolished. English textbooks, on the other hand, had the completely opposite results exhibiting positive prosody(41.38%) as highest. In the case of totally, while ANC data showed negative prosody(54.79%) as being three times more frequent than the positive prosody(18.43%), textbook data revealed equal rates(40%) of positive and negative contexts. These findings suggest that future textbooks should better reflect the collocation pattern of conversation or features of naturally spoken discourse to acquire native-like fluency. (Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies & Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)