| For L2 learners, the textbook is the major source of their exposure to the target language apart from the language input provided by teachers, serving as a basic physical media for learners to receive lexical input and to be involved in lexical output activities in the classroom. Vocabulary is one of the important standards for measuring one’s English proficiency, as well as one of the significant aspects of English learning. Students in secondary school are experiencing a vital period of acquiring and accumulating vocabulary, and the textbook vocabulary input has direct influence on learners’vocabulary acquisition. Since the 1980s, some scholars have been evaluating textbook vocabulary with the aid of corpus tools and statistical methods, comparing the results either with data from one or more General English corpora directly or with the related information obtained from corpus-based studies indirectly. They aim to inspect whether the textbooks present the target vocabulary consistently with their practical use, and whether the most commonly-used vocabulary, word senses and typical usage occur in textbooks (Ljung, 1990; Klinmanee & Sopprasong,1997; Coniam,2004; Matsuoka & Hirsh,2010), judging the rationality and applicability of the textbooks and syllabus design. Enlightened by further textbook research and the English Curriculum Standard (ECS) issued by Chinese Ministry of Education, domestic investigations and assessment of textbook vocabulary began to focus on the presentation of high-frequency words and ECS words (Zhang & Ma, 2007; Li,2009; Liang & He,2009; Xie,2010). Although the studies on textbook vocabulary have been constantly extended in width and depth, they seldom aim at and give deep analysis of polysemous words in the textbook contexts. English (2012 edition) is a series of newly published textbooks compiled under the framework and the guidance of ECS, which have been general English textbooks for compulsory education in Jiangsu Province since 2012. However, the systematic textbook corpus of English has not been built before, so there are few studies on English vocabulary. In addition, the possible influence of the textbook vocabulary coverage on the learners’vocabulary acquisition also needs to be further explored for insufficient verification from former studies.Based on previous research, this study establishes a textbook corpus consisting of 16 students’books belonging to Yilin and Oxford series with a total of 100652 tokens, in which Fun with English (1A-6B) are designed for elementary school learners and English (7A-8B,2012 edition) are newly published textbooks for junior high school learners. The software Range is used to analyze the vocabulary distribution in the textbook corpus, and the Collins COBUILD English-Chinese Dictionary (2006 edition) as well as the retrieval tool Antconc is used to determine the specific senses of the polysemous words in various textbook contexts. In addition, a total of 168 Grade-8 students from two junior middle schools in Nanjing are selected to participate in the polysemy proficiency test. Then the statistical software SPSS is used to examine the possible correlation between the learners’ acquisition of target polysemous words and the words’occurrence and range in the textbooks. In this study, the "high-frequency words" refer to those belonging to the first three existing Baseword Lists of Range software. The "ECS words" refer to those come from the ECS (2011 version) level-2 and level-5 word lists. The "polysemous words" are those with more than one related lexical meanings defined by the Collins COBUILD English-Chinese Dictionary (2006 edition). Accordingly, this study mainly aims to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the coverage and recurrence of high-frequency polysemous words within the ECS in the series of Fun with English and English as a whole textbook system? (2) What are the coverage and recurrence of various senses of the target high-frequency polysemous words within the ECS in this series of textbooks? Do the textbooks give students sufficient exposures to their common senses and typical contextual collocation? (3) To what extent the coverage, recurrence rate and range of textbook vocabulary influence the learners’vocabulary acquisition?According to the quantitative research findings, (1) in width, the series of Fun with English and English as a whole Yilin textbook system covers a wide range of high-frequency words in General English, with more than 89% of total tokens being the high-frequency ones. While junior high school textbooks increase their vocabulary capacity and difficulty a lot. (2) The ECS level-2 and level-5 word lists include 1560 word types, in which 90.42% of 1357 high-frequency curriculum word types and 82.27% of 203 curriculum word types which are not the high-frequency ones occur in textbook corpus.While there are still a total of 166 ECS words absent in the published English textbooks for Grade 7 and 8, including 130 high-frequency words, and nouns take a major part. Some ECS words with abundant senses haven’t appeared in textbook corpus. (3) In 1357 high-frequency words within the ECS there are 1082 polysemous words, of which 340 belong to ECS level-2 word list and 742 belong to ECS level-5 word list.79.71% of the high-frequency polysemous words within level-2 and 70.21% of those within level-5 ECS word list are presented with moderate occurrence rate, whose word families appear averagely 2-5 times per unit. However, the recurrence of polysemous words which have abundant senses and flexible usage within level-5 ECS word list is insufficient. (4) In depth, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of senses of target polysemous words occurring in textbooks shows that some common senses of polysemous words are absent or randomly under-presented, especially those polysemous words with low recurrence. The contextual support and prominence for common senses of polysemous words lack as a whole. (5) 168 subjects averagely acquire 82.53 senses of 70 target polysemous words and figure out 1.18 senses on average for each polysemous word. The distribution range of target polysemous words in textbooks has the significant correlation with junior high school students’acquisition of receptive knowledge of the target polysemous words. In addition, different subjects from different schools and genders perform with significant inter-group differences in the polysemy proficiency test.Based on former corpus-based analysis of textbook vocabulary in width and depth, this study evaluates the rationality of vocabulary and word senses’selection and recurrence in textbooks from the perspective of polysemy, trying to apply these corpus-based findings to the textbook development and formal ESL teaching in classroom, and to provide some instructive implications for the teaching of high-frequency polysemous words at junior high school learning stage. |
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