Vocabulary and Collocations in EFL Textbooks vs. Authentic Materials: A Corpus Study

• Main Authors: Yi-Fang Hsieh, 謝宜方
• Other Authors: 黃希敏
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/u99uuj

碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文研究所 === 98 === In recent years, considerable concern has arisen over the applications of corpus linguistics in English language teaching research. While substantial studies have been done on the impact corpora have on syllabus design and preparation for textbooks, little empirical evidence has been found to establish a direct relationship between textbooks and corpora. In addition, there has been even less research on the effects of corpus-based language teaching studies in the practice of vocational EFL education in Taiwan. To bridge the gap, this thesis attempts to address the areas of concern by trying to shed some light on the contrast between actual learner input and native learner input. In this corpus-based study, textbook presentations of high-frequency lexical items are chosen for analysis in terms of their collocational behavior because textbooks, often considered the main learning materials in vocational EFL, can not only help yield better understanding of the actual input but also determine desired pedagogical effects. Also, the findings will be juxtaposed with those from comparable authentic texts. The textbook corpus in this paper consists of texts from six volumes of a textbook series widely used in vocational high school EFL in Taiwan. The texts and content chosen are supposed to represent written language. Spoken materials such as dialogues and interviews are not included. The textbook texts are selected to enable a comparison with a specialized corpus collected by the researcher and used as the source of authentic data. The authentic text corpus which contains lexical input and text types similar to the textbook corpus constitutes a series of self-study reading materials for first to third graders in the United States. Analytic software AntConc is used for generating high-frequency lexical items and concordancing, while further analyses are carried out manually. The results of this empirical study on collocations of high-frequency lexical input in textbooks as presented and evaluated with respect to their significance for English language teaching in Taiwan.