Textbook Corpus Research Articles

A Study on the Construction and Application of a Korean Textbook Corpus in China

A Study on the Construction and Application of a Korean Textbook Corpus in China

Multi-word expressions for Russian L2 learners: corpora-based selection with expert verification

The article describes the experience of creating a corpus-based list of the most relevant multi-word expressions for Russian L2 learners, distributed across the levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) from A1 to C1. Modern linguistic and cognitive research shows that our speech is patterned and largely consists of stable segments. This fact is supported by the linguodidactic idea of teaching not isolated language units but their combinations of different nature. However, the selection and ranking of multi-word expressions based on language proficiency levels is constrained by the difficulty of automatically extracting them from a corpus of texts and estimating their frequency, as well as disagreements in defining the boundaries, linguistic nature, and terminology of multi-word expressions. This article describes the experience of compiling a list of the most valuable fixed-type multi-word expressions from various sources: two types of existing CEFR-graded vocabulary lists for Russian L2 learners – lexical minimums for the TORFL (Test of Russian as a Foreign Language) system and Russian KELLY (KEywords for Language Learning for Young and adults alike); the most frequent n-grams from the RuFoLa – Russian L2 textbook corpus and from the Russian Web corpus of internet texts; list of discourse formulas from the «Pragmaticon» project. The CEFR level of each multi-word expression is predicted using the frequency-based Max Delta measure, and its effectiveness is subsequently validated through annotation by multiple experts. The resulting list of multi-word expressions contains 1645 entries from A1 to C1 levels. The proposed version of the list has been implemented into an automated text analysis system for learners of Russian as a Foreign Language and can be useful for a wide range of professionals in the preparation of educational content for foreign language learners. The suggested Max Delta measure has demonstrated a high degree of agreement with expert evaluations within proficiency levels A1-B1. This signifies the importance of further exploring its potential in addressing related practical tasks and in selecting language learning content derived for other languages.

High frequency medical Spanish terminology: A corpus-based study of textbooks and reference materials

The purpose of this study is to identify high frequency medical Spanish terminology by building a corpus of medical Spanish textbooks and resources. By discovering the most common terms, instructors and curriculum designers can include salient topics in their courses, which will better serve the learners in these courses. To do so, medical Spanish textbooks and resources from 2012-2022 were uploaded to the corpus software AntConc. The final corpus consisted in a total of 26 resources and 1,421,163 tokens (or words). Word frequencies were calculated, and the top 3,000 most frequent terms were determined. A Semantic Rating Scale (Chung & Nation, 2003; Quero & Coxhead, 2018) was used to categorize words as general or technical. The top 3,000 words covered 38.9% of the entire corpus, and the most frequent words found in the medical Spanish resources were general Spanish vocabulary at 68.2%. The remaining 31.8% were medical Spanish technical terminology. The generation of these lists gives instructors and curriculum designers a tool to use in the development of medical Spanish courses that when combined with a patient-centered, communicative medical Spanish curriculum has the potential to enhance learners’ medical Spanish proficiency.

A Linguistically-Informed Assessment Model for Multidimensional Competence Building in Romanian School Writing

In education, student involvement in writing activities is crucial for enhancing their learning experience and developing multiple competences. The development of any national curriculum within Europe is based on the indispensable competences required for lifelong learning as outlined in the European Parliament’s Reference Framework. In response to the changing landscape of education, the Romanian national curriculum has undergone revisions that currently prioritise a competence-based approach to teaching writing. This approach aims to equip students with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively communicate through writing, enabling them to express their ideas and thoughts clearly and concisely. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that there has been a lack of research conducted to assess the efficacy of the didactic resources and materials developed to facilitate these educational goals. This study uses corpus linguistics methodologies to examine the correlation between the content of textbooks used for writing tasks in primary education, secondary education, and high schools and the pedagogical skills they aim to develop. For this purpose, we have constructed a preliminary textbook corpus called ROTEX, which consists of online materials, specifically Romanian language and communication textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education. The corpus includes three datasets, one for each educational level (4th grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade). Our analysis uses writing tasks to identify linguistic and thematic complexity patterns. This approach allows us to determine the competences that are effectively enhanced at each educational level. Our conclusions are backed up by quantitative linguistic evidence, which provides valuable insights into the dominant competences fostered within the educational framework.

From Corpus to Classroom: Teaching Semi-technical Business English Vocabulary

Semi-technical vocabulary has been considered a challenging and neglected area of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction. This paper employs AntConc to extract a keyword list of a self-compiled business English textbook corpus (BETC). Through manual identification from corpus keywords, we focus on semi-technical vocabulary, addressing the fundamental question of “how to identify”. We also draw upon pedagogical materials from the academic sub-corpora within the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to design a corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP) lesson. This lesson serves as a model for instructing the multifaceted meanings and diverse patterns of the semi-technical word “default” across various disciplines and contexts, addressing the question of “how to teach”. Our research leverages the rich resources provided by pedagogical corpora, offering in-depth analysis, including collocation, colligation, semantic preference, and semantic prosody, as effective teaching aids. In doing so, it promotes interdisciplinary, comparative, and exploratory teaching and learning of semi-technical business English vocabulary. By bridging the gap between corpus analysis and classroom instruction, it provides innovative strategies for educators in the field of business English, and by implication, in various ESP disciplines.

Explainability and transparency in the realm of digital humanities: toward a historian XAI

The recent advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) translated to an increased adoption of AI technology in the humanities, which is often challenged by the limited amount of annotated data, as well as its heterogeneity. Despite the scarcity of data it has become common practice to design increasingly complex AI models, usually at the expense of human readability, explainability, and trust. This in turn has led to an increased need for tools to help humanities scholars better explain and validate their models as well as their hypotheses. In this paper, we discuss the importance of employing Explainable AI (XAI) methods within the humanities to gain insights into historical processes as well as ensure model reproducibility and a trustworthy scientific result. To drive our point, we present several representative case studies from the Sphaera project where we analyze a large, well-curated corpus of early modern textbooks using an AI model, and rely on the XAI explanatory outputs to generate historical insights concerning their visual content. More specifically, we show that XAI can be used as a partner when investigating debated subjects in the history of science, such as what strategies were used in the early modern period to showcase mathematical instruments and machines.

From Needs Analysis to the Establishment of a University Vocabulary List for English Majors

This paper concerns the academic vocabulary needs of undergraduate English majors in a tertiary context in Azerbaijan. Based on the results of the previous studies, it is suggested that developing an appropriate course material to meet the specific learning needs of these students will be beneficial for them. Thus, this study aims to identify the percentage of the running words and high-frequency word families beyond the 2,000 most-frequent words in the university textbook corpus to help the students to attain 98% lexical coverage. To address English majors’ scant academic vocabulary knowledge, a University Vocabulary List has been created. First, a university textbook corpus comprising the words used in 11 subject-specific course textbooks across subject areas taught at Azerbaijan University of Languages was compiled. Next, the range and frequency distribution of the words beyond the British National Corpus scale 2,000-word families was examined. Finally, the 396 most frequently occurring word families in the corpus were chosen; these formed the proposed University Vocabulary List for English majors, accounting for a 6.96% lexical coverage. The University Vocabulary List for English majors and the British National Corpus 2,000 high-frequency word families, including proper nouns, provide a text coverage of 97.28%, which is only marginally lower than the suggested lexical threshold of 98% suggested by Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) and Nation (2006). It is, therefore, argued that the University Vocabulary List represents a sufficiently frequent and relevant vocabulary load for English majors whose secondary educational background and first-year general English textbooks have not equipped them for the linguistic challenges they face at the initial stages of their tertiary education. The article concludes by stating the pedagogical implications for developing these learners’ knowledge and use of the most frequent word families.

Study on Subject Knowledge Building Based on Discipline Discourse Corpus: From the Perspective of Grammatical Metaphor

The purpose of this paper is to explore the distribution characteristics of different grammatical metaphor types in different types of knowledge. Six textbooks of geophysics, writing, geography, management, biochemistry, and history were selected as samples to build their own electronic textbook corpus, and by means of word suffix search and related word form search, it was found that: (1) there are certain distribution characteristics of grammatical metaphor usage types in subject textbooks of different knowledge types. Experiential grammatical metaphors are all used most frequently; interpersonal grammatical metaphors are used more than logical grammatical metaphors in the process of constructing technical knowledge; logical grammatical metaphors are used more than interpersonal grammatical metaphors in the process of constructing educational or daily knowledge. (2) The hierarchical nature of the representation, presentation, and organization of knowledge differs among knowledge types and it is inferred that technical knowledge is highest hierarchy knowledge type. This study also has some implications for the development and evaluation of teaching materials.

언어자료기반 학습법(DDL)을 적용한 초등학교 6학년 영어 문장 쓰기 학습 효과 연구

This study investigates the effect of the DDL (Data-Driven Learning) approach on the English sentence writing ability of 6th graders in elementary school. To this end, a total of seven English textbooks were used to build a corpus. Five teachers were then asked to conduct five lessons using a weak version of DDL in their 6-grade EFL classrooms. Students were asked to complete a pre- and post-test and a pre- and post-survey, and a selected number of students and four of the five teachers had in-depth interviews with the researcher. The results are as follows: First, DDL using the textbook corpus was found to be adequate for helping elementary students improve their sentence-writing ability. Second, DDL had a significant effect on upper, middle, and lower level groups of students. Third, the students felt that DDL was neither unfamiliar nor difficult. Fourth, teachers with little teaching experience found it easy to conduct their classes using the DDL approach. This study implies that DDL is an effective approach to teaching communicative functions and language forms in the elementary English classroom and can be useful for all levels of elementary students.

The pilot corpus of German language textbooks for the second-grade students

The article studies the issues of textbooks corpus creation and its application for solving various applied and research problems. The authors have analyzed the works of global and Russian linguists in the field of corpus linguistics. That made it possible to identify the characteristic structural and design features of pedagogical buildings, and, in particular, textbook buildings, as well as to describe various ways of using textbook buildings for conducting linguodidactic research. Special attention is paid to the design and technological process of creating a corpus of textbooks. Having critically analyzed the recommended stages of the corpus creation, the authors have modeled and constructed a corpus of texts of German textbooks for elementary schools, which was tested in a comparative frequency analysis of vocabulary from textbooks. That required using the methods of modeling, frequency-rank method, and comparative analysis. This article was presented as a paper at the 8th Research Conference “Conference on Text Interpretation: Data Analysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities” (17 July 2022, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tyumen).

Themes of medical profession and professional socialization in medical sociology textbooks

Introduction: The present study examines the information on the medical profession and how the changes occurring in the medical practice, the social role and the evaluation of the physician are reflected in the English and Hungarian language medical sociology textbooks used in Hungary. Method: We analyzed chapters of Hungarian language medical sociology textbooks of thelast 25 years that discuss medical profession and student choices, and textbooks used in English language courses of Semmelweis University. Results: The corpus of the Hungarian textbooks (history of medical profession, medical role models, models of doctor-patient relationships, medical socialization) stayed relatively unchanged. While preserving the myth of the medical profession, there are criticisms towards the role and relationship models. The theme of the medical education gradually disappears from theEnglish language textbooks. The social positions of the medical profession and health care are discussed in a broader context, focusing on the health care system and health care provision, incorporating the allied professions, and taking aspects of patients/consumers into greater consideration. Summary: Both textbook types reflect on the changes in the social position of the medical profession. However, the English literature approaches the modernization processes from the angles of the health care system and health care provision, resulting in the diminishing importance of the topic of medical profession while the Hungarian literature focuses on the profession and professional education of physicians.

Which Words Matter Most? Operationalizing Lexical Prevalence For Rank-Ordered Word Lists

AbstractThe words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency, dispersion, or adjusted frequency. Yet, to date, there is no consensus on best practices for identifying and ranking prevalent words in a corpus, or for evaluating the degree to which a word’s importance is reflected through its prevalence. We begin this paper by introducing and describing a wide range of corpus-based measures for quantifying lexical prevalence. We then carry out two case studies on the Duolingo University Textbook Corpus to evaluate the methods for their ability to identify and appropriately rank words in terms of their importance. We conclude with recommendations for word list creators and researchers and practitioners interested in word importance.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO EFL MAJORS’ VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE AND THE VOCABULARY COVERAGE OF AN EFL COURSEBOOK AT TERTIARY LEVEL IN VIETNAM

The study sheds light on Vietnamese English-majored university students’ vocabulary knowledge with the use of Webb, Sasao and Ballance’s (2017) [1] Updated Vocabulary Level Test Form B. Also, the researchers analyzed the EFL textbook that was currently being used by those students regarding the vocabulary coverage of the book in relation to the two thresholds of 95% and 98%. To fulfill this objective, a frequency-based analysis of word families using the Vocabprofilers on the https:\\www.lextutor.ca\ website were conducted with the 68,918-word textbook corpus. The group of students was found to master only the first 1,000 word level, yet they achieved quite encouraging results with relatively small proportions of unknown words in the highest frequency word levels. Interestingly, the number of students mastering the lower frequency words of 4,000 and 5,000 word levels were found to be higher than that of the higher frequency words of 3,000 word level, which emphasizes the importance of teachers’ appropriate selection of vocabulary input for Vietnamese students to enhance their opportunities and exposure to the most frequent and dominant English words. This requirement seems to be fulfilled with the textbook being used for the very students - Real Life Upper Intermediate, which was found to effectively represent the highest-frequency words of the English language. Moreover, the textbook, which was estimated to require a receptive lexical knowledge of 3,000 and 4,000 word families for 95% and 98% coverage, is preliminarily evaluated as an appropriate selection for the students.

Квантитативні характеристики лексичного складу підручників з китайської мови початкового рівня

Despite the fact that textbooks are central in Chinese language learning, only limited research has explored to what extent textbooks’ content is relevant from a vocabulary perspective. In recent years much work on the potential of quantitative database of Chinese elementary textbooks has been carried out in modern Chinese linguistics; however there is still considerable disagreement with regard to practical objective data on vocabulary used in Chinese language textbooks at different levels. This paper focuses specifically on the quantitative analysis and aims to introduce the quantitative characteristics of vocabulary in four Chinese elementary textbooks: “Practical Chinese Reader” “新实用汉语课本”, “Developing Chinese. Comprehensive course. Beginner level” “发展汉语初级综合”, “Boya Chinese. Elementary” “博雅汉语初级”, “Chinese course” “汉语教程”. In order to identify quantitative database the corpus has been constructed based on the words in the textbooks. The main stages of building text corpus of Chinese elementary textbooks are outlined. Statistical significance was analyzed through the use of linguistic Internet program “Chinese Corpus online”. The research results are presented. Based on the database, statistical analyses, such as the index of vocabulary diversity, the index of exclusivity, the average repetition of the word in the text, etc., are conducted. This work has proved that there is great variation in the number and selection of words across the books indicating that there does not seem to be a common thought behind word selection in textbooks used to teach Chinese as a foreign language. The present findings have important implications for future textbook development and may be used for writing Chinese textbook for Ukrainian students. Future studies on the current topic are therefore required in order to establish a frequency dictionary and a quantitative proficiency guideline for material development.

Vocabulary Coverage in a High School Vietnamese EFL Textbook: A Corpus-based Preliminary Investigation

In the context of English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, textbooks play a crucial role in the classroom as the primary source of lexical input for learners. Thus, it is essential that textbooks can sufficiently facilitate learners in their overall comprehension and vocabulary learning, especially with the most frequent words in English. The study examined the vocabulary load of a locally-published EFL textbook in Vietnam for high school students focusing on the vocabulary coverage in relation to the 95% and 98% thresholds for text comprehension and the coverage of high-frequency word families in the textbook. To fulfil these objectives, a frequency-based analysis of word families using the Vocabprofilers on the https://www.lextutor.ca/ website was conducted with the 41,137-word textbook corpus. It is revealed that students need to have a vocabulary size of 3,000 and 5,000-word families to reach the coverage of 95% and 98% of the whole textbook, which would be too challenging for Vietnamese high school students. Moreover, the textbook was found not to represent the second 1,000-word list very well with the appearance of just over half of the second most frequent 1,000-word families. These findings highlight the role of teachers in adapting the textbook for more effective vocabulary learning and general comprehension of the materials.

A Corpus-based Analysis of High School English Textbooks and English University Entrance Exams in Turkey

This study aims to explore the missing link between English textbooks used in high schools (9th-12th grades) and English university entrance exams (2010-2019) in Turkey on lexical and syntactic complexity levels by using corpus linguistics tools: AntWordProfiler, TAALED, and the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA). Official textbooks and complementary materials obtained from the Ministry of National Education have been compared against the official university entrance exams from the past decade. The results show that: (i) differences in lexical sophistication level can be observed between the two corpora, the lexical sophistication level of the exam corpus was higher than that of the textbook corpus, (ii) there is a statistically significant difference between the two corpora in terms of lexical diversity, the exam corpus has a significantly higher level of lexical diversity than the textbook corpus, (iii) statistically significant differences also existed between the two corpora regarding the syntactic complexity indices. The syntactic complexity level of the exam corpus was higher than that of the textbook corpus. The findings suggest that Turkish high school students who have to learn English with the official textbooks throughout their high school years will have to tackle low-frequency and more sophisticated words at a higher level of syntactic complexity at the time of taking the nationwide exam. This, in return, creates a negative backwash effect, distorts their approach to L2, and raises other concerns about the misalignment between the official language education materials and nationwide exams.

A Corpus Linguistics Approach to the Representation of Western Religious Beliefs in Ten Series of Chinese University English Language Teaching Textbooks.

The early Sino-Western contact was through the way in which religion and language interact to produce language contact. However, research on this contact is relatively limited to date, particularly in the realm of English language materials. In fact, there is a paucity of research on Western religions in English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks. By applying corpus linguistics as a tool and the Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical framework, this manuscript critically investigates the significant semantic domains in ten English language textbook series that are officially approved and are widely used in Chinese universities. The findings suggest that various Western religious beliefs, which are the highly unusual topics in previous Chinese ELT textbooks, are represented in the textbook corpus. The results also show that when presenting the views and attitudes toward Western religious beliefs, these textbooks have adopted an eclectic approach to the material selection. Surprisingly, positive semantic prosody surrounding the concept of religion is evident and no consistent negative authorial stance toward religion is captured. Atheism has been assumed to be in the center of Chinese intellectual traditions and the essence of the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly, the findings from this study provide a new understanding of Chinese foreign language textbooks in the new era, and its addition to the literature on the study of ELT textbooks, as well as its development worldwide.

A Corpus-based Analysis on Distributional Patterns of Collocations in Chinese High School English Textbooks

The paper explores the distributional patterns of collocations identified in Chinese high school textbooks in comparison with collocations found in the native reference corpus. Six series of Chinese high school English textbooks from the six publishers were compiled as the textbook corpus. The British National Corpus (BNC) was selected as the native norm. Three collocation types, adjective + noun collocation (ANC), verb + noun collocation (VNC) and noun + noun collocation (NNC), were investigated in the paper. The distribution of the collocations was compared between the two corpora in terms of four statistical measures: density, diversity, repetition and association strength. The results showed that whereas the diversity of collocations was higher in the native reference corpus than in the textbook corpus, the other measures showed the opposite pattern. This may partly be due to the pedagogical nature of the textbooks. Moreover, the findings revealed that the textbooks represent a comparable number of VNCs, over-represent ANCs and under-represent NNCs in comparison with the native reference corpus. The findings suggest that textbook authors take account of incorporating more diverse collocations and more NNCs to model more native-like texts in the teaching materials targeting higher-grade students.

Improving Modal Verb Treatment in English Textbooks Used by Chinese Learners: A Corpus-Based Approach

This study demonstrates how native and learner corpora can enhance modal verb treatment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks used in mainland China. Data analysis compares modal verbs in the textbook and native corpus by referring to distributional features, semantic functions and co-occurring constructions; and the analysis of the learner corpus refers to the use/misuse of modal verbs. A corpora comparison considers the authenticity of textbook language; and examination of learner use/misuse of modal verbs provides a learner perspective for textbook presentation that is applicable to learning difficulties. In this regard, this study highlights discrepancies between textbook treatment of modal verbs and authentic modal use in constructions, distributions and semantic functions, and its application of error analysis reveals inter/intra-linguistic interference in the use of modal verbs. This study can thus contribute to a corpus-informed and learner-centered design of grammar presentation in EFL textbooks that enhances the authenticity and appropriateness of textbook language for target learners.

Exploration of Phrasal Verbs in ELT Textbooks: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Lower Secondary Level Bangladeshi Books

The study aims at exploring the usage of the Phrasal Verbs in the lower secondary Bangladeshi ELT textbooks which are prescribed by the Government of Bangladesh at national education levels. The methodological approach continues in this study based on the corpus tools and related analysis on the topic of Phrasal Verbs usage in those textbooks. The phrasal verbs that are found in the textbooks are extracted from the textbooks; their frequency distributions are analyzed, and finally checked with the two most authentic corpus of the English Language - The British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Alongside, deriving the top fifteen Phrasal Verbs in the textbook corpus with their significant values; the relative positions to the two reference corpora and other corpus-related scores of the phrasal verbs are compared, regarding the study of Liu (2011). The results find that the Phrasal Verbs used in the selected textbooks are quite irrelevant to the two standard big corpora. Finally, based on the findings some remarks and implications are prescribed for pedagogical purposes. The current study would be the first one that examines the Bangladeshi Lower Secondary ELT textbooks assisted by the corpus approach.