A Corpus-based Study Of Vocabulary In New Standard English Textbooks For Junior High School

Textbooks are the main source of language input in middle school English teaching whose presentation of vocabulary will directly affect the quality of vocabulary teaching.And the emergence of corpus greatly promotes the study of vocabulary in textbooks.In view of the fact that previous studies have focused on college and senior high school English textbooks and English textbooks for junior high school have been ignored,so this study evaluates the vocabulary of the New Standard English textbooks for junior high school which are published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in order to see whether the compilation of the textbooks strictly conforms to the requirements of the New English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education.There are three research questions in this paper,namely:1)How does the vocabulary in the textbooks coincide with the word lists of English Curriculum Standards(henceforth the curriculum standards words)?2)What is the recurrence rate of those curriculum standards words in the textbooks?3)How does the complexity of vocabulary in textbooks go with the increase of learning time?In order to deal with the above questions,two corpuses are built,including textbooks vocabulary corpus with 129,193 words from New Standard English textbooks and the corpus of curriculum standards words from New Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education.Meanwhile,the data are analyzed by using four tools: AntConc 3.4,Range,Tree Tagger and EXCEL.The first thing is to measure whether all curriculum standards words appear in the textbooks;secondly,what needs to be reckoned is the repetition rate of the curriculum standards vocabulary in the textbooks;the last aspect is the complexity change of vocabulary between each textbook which can be seen from the total vocabulary input,the type-token ratio and the common degree of vocabulary.The major findings are as follows.1)In New Standard English textbooks,thecoverage rate of the curriculum standards words is as high as 96.40%,with only 56 missing.2)In terms of the repetition rate,40% of the curriculum standards words appear less than twice in each book on average,and 24% of the words appear less than once in each book on average.3)In terms of the complexity change,the total input of vocabulary and the type-token ratio do not fully conform to the changing rule from the easier to the more difficult between some volumes,such as the sharp decline in the total input of vocabulary from the Book 1 to Book 2 of the ninth grade and the negative growth on the type-token ratio between Book 2 of the seventh grade and Book 1 of the eighth grade.The change trend of the common degree of textbooks vocabulary is not obvious between different volumes.The overall ratio is not high because only around 70% of the words appearing in the textbooks belong to those words commonly used in daily life.The New Standard English textbooks for junior middle schools have a high coverage rate of the curriculum standards words,but the rate of repetition is low,and the complexity of vocabulary is generally on the rise,but there is a downward trend among some volumes,which does not fully conform to the rule that learning should follow the principle of gradual improvement.In the last part of the thesis,some practical suggestions for textbook compilers are provided to further improve the coverage and the rate of repetition of the curriculum standards words in the textbooks and the scientificity of vocabulary arrangement.What is more,some suggestions are also provided for teachers to help students master vocabulary better.