Vocabulary Input In EFL Middle School Textbooks In China---A Corpus-based Study Of Frequency,Complexity And Distribption

Textbook, as the main medium of teaching and learning, has been in the core status of teaching process, and it is also the major linguistic input source, thus becoming the crucial vocabulary input source. Due to the shortage of sufficient research on vocabulary analysis in middle school English textbooks in China, this study sets its goal to investigate the vocabulary distribution pattern in middle school EFL textbooks at different difficulty levels in China as well as the vocabulary frequency levels and lexical complexities. This study vertically compares EFL textbooks in China’s middle schools of different difficulty levels in order to find out in which aspects are these lexical complexities demonstrated and the characteristics of lexical distribution and frequency levels. The corpus analysis has been conducted by the means of Range32and Wordsmith5. Results show that the textbook vocabulary input conforms to the rule of natural language learning process of middle school students, which is from simple ones to complex and diversified ones, from spoken/informal to written/formal, from more functional words, to nouns and then verbs. The textbook vocabulary input is different from that of native English speakers, but is getting closer to theirs.