A Study Of Vocabulary In English Textbooks For Senior High School By Beijing Normal University Press

Vocabulary plays an irreplaceable role in English learning,therefore English textbooks,whose vocabulary features and its distribution make a great difference in students' second language acquisition,are the main source of language learning.Senior high school English textbooks by Beijing Normal University Press are typical English textbooks in China,however,few people did research on its vocabulary features and whether its vocabulary size meets the requirement of New high school English curriculum standard.The situation mentioned above puzzles both students and teachers when using these textbooks.There are three main research questions in this thesis:(1)What is the vocabulary size of the nine English textbooks by Beijing Normal University Press and how much curriculum standard vocabulary appears in these textbooks?(2)What is the vocabulary frequency of the words in the nine target textbooks and how often does the curriculum standard vocabulary appear in these textbooks?(3)What is the vocabulary range in the nine target English textbooks and how wide does the curriculum standard vocabulary appear in the target textbooks?This thesis is based on input hypothesis,cognitive theory and frequency hypothesis.Nine high school English textbooks are taken as the subjects while RANGE software is used as the tool.A series of results are achieved through the process of analysis.Firstly,there are 60114 tokens,6452 types and 3207 families in the nine target English textbooks.And 2825 tokens,2426 types and 2115 families of senior high school English curriculum standard appear in these textbooks,accounting for 69.14 percent,67.58 percent and 82.30 percent respectively.Secondly,amongst the curriculum standard vocabulary,990 types accounting for 40.81 percent and 650 families accounting for 30.74 percent appear once or twice,which are called low-frequency vocabulary.Moreover,807 types accounting for 33.26 percent and 686 families accounting for 32.43 percent of the curriculum standard words appear for three to nine times(medium-frequency vocabulary)in the textbooks.Those appearing more than nine times(high-frequency vocabulary)have got the quantities of 629 types and 779 families accounting for 25.93 and 36.83 percent respectively.Thirdly,among the curriculum standard vocabulary appearing in the target textbooks,1096 types accounting for 45.18 percent and 1006 families accounting for 47.56 percent appear in only one or two textbooks which are called small-range vocabulary,and 679 types accounting for 27.99 percent and 604 families accounting for 28.56 percent appear in three to six textbooks(medium-range vocabulary),also there are 651 types accounting for 26.83 percent and 505 families accounting for 23.88 percent appearing in more than six textbooks(large-range vocabulary).In conclusion,the vocabulary size of the nine target English textbooks is large enough,but the vocabulary frequency is quite low and the vocabulary range is relatively small.Similarly,curriculum standard vocabulary appearing in the nine textbooks shares the features that low-frequency vocabulary is large and vocabulary range is small.Apart from that,there are 507 types accounting for 14.12 percent and 179 families accounting for 6.96 percent neither in the nine target English textbooks by Beijing Normal University Press nor in the word list of compulsory education stage.