A Corpus-Based Study Of China’s High School English Textbooks:a Cultural And Lexical Perspective

Studies on linguistic corpus have been around for quite some time, but corpus-based researches aimed at Basic English textbooks are scan and scarce. Although large-scale corpus-based resources are available both at home and abroad, they are not so convenient to put into operation in terms of their special application, data types and particular sizes for particular purposes, thus failing to meet the individual demands of researchers and learners alike. It is highly necessary, therefore, to set up moderate individualized corpora for specific purposes.This paper is a tentative study on the application of corpus-based resources in Basic English teaching, especially in culture teaching. For this purpose, the whole set of senior high school English textbooks published by People’s Education Press in2007are transformed into a database with the aid of specialized software and the database can be readily employed to comprehensively explore the vocabulary in the above-mentioned senior high school English textbooks at different levels, which will contribute to a new mode of English teaching in high schools. This kind of corpus-based English teaching and learning in senior high schools is concerned mainly with the significance of culture teaching, highlighting the advantages of corpus-based resources in such teaching and learning, including word frequency statistics, indexes and collocations in the teaching and learning process. It is hoped that corpus-based culture teaching in Basic English will be made more effective with the help of the database. Since research on and practice in corpus-based culture teaching are still scan and scarce at present, the present study leaves much to improve in future studies.