A Corpus-based Study On The Selection And Distribution Of Vocabulary In College English Coursebooks

In 2004, four sets of college English coursebooks passed the evaluation organized by the Ministry of Education of China. This paper explores the characteristics of the vocabulary selection and distribution in the four sets of college English coursebooks since the coursebooks are the major vehicle of vocabulary acquisition for non-English major college students of China.The study is conducted based on the corpus composed of 752 texts, totaling 569, 070 words. The data were collected and processed with tailor-written computer programs in FoxPro, a data managing system.The result reveals that:(1) The occurrence rates of core vocabulary, namely syllabus vocabulary, in some coursebooks are rather low.(2) All of the four sets of coursebooks have lower inter-textual lexical repetition rates of core vocabulary.(3) In terms of the lexical density of each text, some texts are not sequenced from the easier to the more difficult.(4) The single text occurrence rates of the core vocabulary of the four sets of intensive reading coursebooks are different. As a result, the growth patterns of core vocabulary in the four sets of intensive reading coursebooks differ greatly.Therefore, the core vocabulary control is needed to be taken seriously so as to help the learners acquire sufficient core vocabulary in an efficient way and meet the requirements of vocabulary stipulated by CECR.