An Analysis Of Collocations In Two EFL Textbooks For Junior High School Students

Collocations play an indispensible role in English learning for learners, as they help learners use fluent and idiomatic language. Textbooks are the major language input sources for English learners, thus they are also the major sources of collocations acquisition for English learners. There have been some studies abroad and at home analyzing collocations in English textbooks. However, no one has ever studied collocations in textbooks English and Go for it, which are newly published for junior high school students in China. This thesis aims to analyze collocations in English and Go for it from the aspects of number, frequency and range.In this study, collocations are extracted from the wordlists of two textbooks. A wordlist is an important part of a textbook, because it includes important words and multi-word items in each unit, which provides teachers and students with guidance for teaching and learning. To gather the data for this study, the paper copies of the two textbooks English and Go for it are firstly changed to electronic ones. Secondly, an attempt is made to list all multi-word items in the wordlists of them. In order to identify collocations from multi-word items in the two textbooks, two collocational dictionaries Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (Lea,2002) and The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English:A Guide to Word Combinations (Benson et al., 1986b) are used as references. Thirdly, the selected collocations are lemmatized to make the research data more reliable. Next, with the help of Wordsmith Tools 6.0, this study gets the number, frequency and range of collocations in the two textbooks. The major findings of the present study are as follows:(1) There are 240 collocations from the wordlists of English and 209 collocations from those of Go for it. The number of collocations in both of them meets the requirement of National English Curriculum for Nine-year Compulsory Education (2011), which requires junior high school students to learn 200 to 300 collocations when they graduate. Besides, this study finds that English and Go for it incorporate 5 to 6 and 3 to 4 new collocations per lesson on average respectively.(2) The majority of collocations in both textbooks occur in low frequency. In English, there are 97 collocations only occurring once or twice, accounting for 40% of the total collocations. And the number of collocations occurring from three to five times is 65, accounting for 27.5% of the total collocations. Thus, there are 162 collocations occurring from once to five times (under the threshold of six times suggested by Saragi et al. (1978)), which accounts for 67.5%, more than half of the total collocations. As for high-frequency collocations (six times and over), there are 51 collocations occurring from six to fourteen times and 27 collocations occurring fifteen times and over, accounting for 21.3% and 11.2% of the total collocations respectively. Similar to those in English, the collocations in Go for it are mostly low-frequency ones. The number of collocations that occur once or twice is 101, accounting for 48.3%, close to half of the total collocations. And there are 53 collocations occurring from three to five times, accounting for 25.4%. Thus, there are 154 collocations in all occurring between once and five times, accounting for 73.7%. On the other hand, the number of collocations occurring from six to fourteen times, and fifteen times and over is 35 and 20 respectively (accounting for 16.7% and 9.6%).(3) In terms of the range of collocations in English,118 new collocations are in textbooks for students in grade seven,59 new collocations for students in grade eight, and 63 new collocations for students in grade nine. In Go for it, there are no big differences among five volumes of textbooks in terms of the range of collocations. There are 73 collocations in textbooks for students in grade seven,83 collocations in textbooks for students in grade eight, and 53 collocations in the textbook for students in grade nine (only one volume textbook).When the relationship between range and frequency is concerned in the two textbooks, it can be found that the higher the re-occurrence rate a collocation has, the better distributed the collocation is, or vice versa. However, there are some exceptions. For example, some high-frequency collocations are focused on only one unit while some low-frequency collocations are distributed fairly.Based on the research findings, it can be concluded that the number of collocations in both textbooks meets the requirement of National English Curriculum for Nine-year Compulsory Education (2011). And the majority of collocations in them occur in low frequency. Then, as for the range of collocations, high-frequency collocations are distributed fairly, but there is an exception. For example, few of them though with high frequency are distributed in a narrow range, while some low-frequency collocations are distributed fairly.