A Corpus-based Evaluation On The Vocabulary In Coursebook Of Senior English Oxford Shanghai Edition

As the foremost resource of language input in high school English teaching and learning,coursebook strongly influences vocabulary teaching by its selection and presentation of vocabulary.Teachers should be capable of evaluating the vocabulary content of coursebook with the attempt to promote the efficiency of vocabulary teaching and to respond actively to the call of the curriculum reform and the revision of coursebooks,which sets an urgent need for a corpus-based evaluation on the vocabulary in the coursebook of Senior English Oxford Shanghai Edition.Firstly,the study reviews relevant researches concerning coursebook evaluation and the width and depth of vocabulary knowledge,clarifies the influence of vocabulary content in the coursebook on vocabulary learning,and constructs scientific methodology by summarizing corpus-based researches at home and abroad.The study use three corpus tools:AntConc 3.4,RANGE and TreeTagger to analyse the self-built coursebook corpus of more than 120,000 words with two reference word lists from National English Curriculum Standard and Shanghai English Curricumlum Standard.The investigation on the coverage of both word lists and the meanings of homographs shows how well the vocabulary content in the coursebook meets the need of Curriculun Standard,and the arrangement of vocabulary content is evaluated from the perspectives of input amount,vocabulary difficulty level and richness,frequency and distribution of key words and referential grammar patterns.The research findings are as follows:1)The vocabulary content in the coursebook poorly meets the need of Curriculum Standard with a rather low coverage of both Curriculum Words List and the different meanings of homographs required in Curriculum Standard.2)The vocabulary content is selected and organized scientificly in the sense of the total amount of vocabulary input and the selection of grammar pattern.3)However,the arrangement of vocabulary should be improved urgently becasue the difficulty level and the lexical richness do not develop gradually through the textbook series,and the frequency of key vocabularies and the key grammar patterns are rather low.Based on the answers,the research provides practical suggestions for both textbook revision and vocabulary teaching.For instance,coursebook writers can achieve a better coverage of Curriculum words by classfying missing words by topic and then supplying new reading materials accordingly or adapting the existing materials.Teachers can integrate the missing Curriculum words into daily teaching based on the topic,provide students with more language input to cover the missing meanings of homographs,encourage students to learn the grammar patterns by data-driven learning and so on.Also,the study explores the possibilites of expanding the corpus research to the context of secondary school.