A Corpus-based Study Of Vocabulary In Junior English Textbooks

Textbooks have great potential for instigating and guiding changes in English Language Teaching. For China, it is urgent to choose the reasonable English teaching materials because of the diversified textbook and the new reformation of English teaching. Therefore, corpus approach using for vocabulary investigation in EFL textbooks is worthy to be done. The thesis is expected to provide a new framework for systematic evaluation of textbook vocabu1 ary, and give some suggestions for improving textbooks in vocabu1 ary section through the corpus research.Vocabulary is the basic elements of language, which is an essential part for EFL learning. In the textbook, vocabulary also plays important roles in language teaching and learning, syllabus design and textbook compilation. However, the textbooks required to present large quantity and wide content vocabularies, and the English textbooks all consist of the topics, subjects, scenes or structure of each unit, so how system reasonably selects and presents vocabulary in textbook compilation is becoming more difficult. It’s obviously that the study of vocabulary in textbooks is necessary.This present study is an empirical investigation of textbook vocabulary based on corpus, and takes Go For It as an example. It is a corpus-based study of Junior English textbook vocabulary, and the investigation based on the English Curriculum Standards(2011 version) study the textbook vocabulary from Word Range and Word Frequency, discuss about the relationship between the Word Type, Word Family, Vocabulary Size, Word Recurrence and Language Learning on account of Lexical Repetition.This thesis will start off with a general description and theoretical analysis of this study, it focuses on the coverage of Curriculum Words and Basic Words, tries to check whether they are match the vocabulary in Junior English textbooks or not, and shows the current situation of “word-recurrence” in Junior English textbooks through the I.S.P. Nation and Ellis’ theories. If it isn’t, the teaching materials need changing. After discussions, the coverage of Basic Words and Curriculum Words will be illustrated. Through these data analysis, figures showed coverage of Basic Words is better than coverage of Curriculum Words, and the current situation of “word-recurrence” in Junior English textbooks can match students’ learning needs.