| There is no doubt that textbook takes up an important position in English teaching and learning. Not only is it the main foundation on which teachers to carry out teaching activities, but also an important resource and tool for students to utilize. Vocabulary accounts for a significant part of English teaching, so the compilation of teaching materials and language teaching should also need to take the vocabulary selection and control into account. In the previous researches, it can be found that Chinese English learners present some deficiencies in vocabulary size, word frequency, lexical diversity, and lexical styles to varying degrees; Precisely, limited vocabulary size, relatively low quality in vocabulary usage, and irrational lexical structure etc.. With researches on vocabulary going deep into and research methods updating constantly, the study on textbook vocabulary will continue to extend in depth and breadth. Advance with English published by Yilin Press in 2011 is a set of senior high school English textbooks complied under the guidance of English curriculum standard, which is widely used in Jiangsu province. This series of textbooks is divided into two parts of compulsory and elective. The compulsory consists of 5 modules from book 1 to book 5, each book including 3 units, and the elective part is made up of the rest 6 modules, each module having 4 units, adding up all units, there being 39 units in total. Until now, there is no corpus based on the textbooks having been established and relevant researches on its vocabulary are few. In view of this, we start building the Advance with English corpus including all the modules of 39 units. With the aid of Range ECV, vocabulary in the textbook Advance with English will be analyzed with the aim of trying to discover the vocabulary size of the textbooks, the distribution of vocabulary in the textbooks and get some pedagogical implications for English vocabulary teaching in senior high school. The present study aims at answering the following questions:(1) What are the vocabulary size, frequency and range in the textbooks?(2) What are the curriculum vocabulary size, frequency and range in the textbooks?Analysis of the textbooks vocabulary shows that (1) there are 4442 words appearing in the textbooks, except the names of person and place, the rest being 3982 words, which is far beyond 3500 words required in the English Curriculum Standard. Among them, 129 curriculum words of senior high school stage are absent. (2) 52.61% words appeared more than 6 times, 18.73% appeared 3 to 5 times and 28.66% words appeared 1 to 2 times; 41.68%words appeared in more than 6 units, 21.40% in 3 to 5 units and 36.92% in 1 to 2 units.(3)40.96% of the senior high school curriculum words appeared more than 6 times, 25.77%appeared 3 to 5 times and 33.26% appeared 1 to 2 times; 20.58% of senior high school curriculum words appeared in more than 6 units, 30.49% in 3 to 5 units and 48.93% in 1 to 2 units.In conclusion, the study employs the software Range with ECS vocabulary lists to investigate the vocabulary size and vocabulary distribution focusing on its frequency and range in the established textbooks corpus. The results show that the vocabulary size of textbooks meets or even exceeds the requirements of English Curriculum Standards, but its vocabulary distribution is not balanced reflected in its words of low frequency and range ratio, to which more attention should be given, therefore. |
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