| We view the textbook as a tool that facilitates the process of language teaching and learning.In China,the textbook has become one of the main sources of language input because of the lack of real context of using English language.It is crucial for both teachers and students.With the implementation of the New English Curriculum Standards,an increasing number of English textbooks have been published and widely used in different regions in China.Confronting with various textbooks,the textbook evaluation which aims to measure the value of the textbook has attracted much attention.As one of the important parts in the textbook,the presentation of vocabulary becomes a standard for evaluating the textbook.The present study aims to make a contrastive analysis on the vocabulary of the two sets of English textbooks for senior high school,which are widely used in different regions in China.One is the New Senior English for China(NSEC)published by the People's Education Press,the other is Senior High English(SHE)published by Beijing Normal University Press.The corpus-based approach is adopted in the present study to obtain further in-depth information on the presentation of vocabulary in the two sets of English textbooks.It is one of the most widely-used methods used for,evaluating the textbook and the distinct advantage of using the corpus-based approach is that it makes the textbook vocabulary evaluation more objective and effective compared with the traditional ways.The major objective of the present study is to investigate the vocabulary distribution and the features of presentation of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge in the two sets of English textbooks.Therefore,the research is intended to address the following questions:1.What are the differences between the two sets of English textbooks in terms of the vocabulary distribution?2.What are the features of two sets of English textbooks in terms of the presentation of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge?For the first question,the author mainly explores the distribution of the vocabulary in the SHE and the NSEC with the help of WordSmith Tool 4.0.The author figures out that both of two sets of English textbooks show their strengths and weaknesses in terms of the vocabulary distribution.As far as the distribution of types in each book of two sets of textbooks is concerned,the SHE does a little better than the NSEC.The distribution of types in each book of the SHE steadily increases in numbers,while there is a slight drop in Book 4 of NSEC.Secondly,as for the distribution of tokens in each book of two sets of textbooks,the SHE still does a little better than the NSEC.To be specific,compared with the SHE,the distribution of tokens in each book of the NSEC seems not as steady and reasonable as that in the SHE.Book 2 has a little fewer tokens than Book 1,and Book 4 has a little fewer tokens than that in Book 3.It will be quite reasonable that the set of textbooks increase the vocabulary size gradually with grade growth.Thirdly,as far as the lexical density is concerned,the lexical density in each book of the SHE is quite reasonable at the beginning,however,the sudden drop in the Book 5 does not agree on well with the process of language learning.As for the NSEC,the lexical density in each book is not quite steady to a large extent.The second question mainly aims to reveal the features and limitations of the investigated textbooks in the presentation of breadth and depth of the vocabulary.The present study attempts to investigate the presentation of breadth and depth of vocabulary by analyzing the coverage,repetition as well as the representation of typical pattern and common collocation of the high-frequency words,especially targeting at the high-frequency adjectives.The investigation of breadth of vocabulary knowledge through the analysis of the coverage and repetition of the target words has shown that generally the two sets of English textbooks present well in the aspect of coverage;however,both the SHE and NSEC still need to be adapted in the aspect of the repetition.We find that both of two sets of English textbooks generally cover more than half of the high-frequency adjectives in the frequency list of adjectives.As for the repetition,most of the shared adjectives in the two sets of English textbooks appear 1 to 5 times and only few of them appear more than 16 times,which makes students have difficulty in acquiring them more effectively.The investigation of depth of vocabulary knowledge through the analysis of representation of typical pattern and collocation of the target words has shown that generally the two sets of English textbooks present well in the aspect of collocation apart from a little inappropriateness.However,there are deficiencies of textbooks in the presentation of typical patterns.The two sets of textbooks still need to be adapted in the aspect of presentation of vocabulary knowledge,especially the depth of vocabulary. |
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