A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Transition Of Textbooks For Primary And Middle Schools

As we all know,English is playing a more and more important role in the development of our society.To meet the requirements of globalization,more and more attention has been put on English teaching and learning.And vocabulary,as an important part in English teaching and learning,should not be neglected.Therefore,on the basis of the Input Hypothesis and the “i+1” theory advanced by Vygotsky,the research studies the lexical transition of two sets of books,which are primary English textbooks published by Hunan Children's Publishing House(Grade 3 to Grade 6)and Junior High school textbooks(PEP edition)with Range.The research mainly focuses on the following 3 questions:1.Is the vocabulary in the primary English textbooks(Xiangshao Edition)more difficult than that in the junior English textbooks(PEP Edition)? And is the size of vocabulary in Xiangshao Edition larger than that in the junior English textbooks(PEP Edition)?2.Does the vocabulary in Xiangshao Edition reiterate in the junior English textbooks(PEP Edition)? If yes,how is the coverage of vocabulary?3.Are there problems on lexical transition for primary and middle school teachers in Changsha in practical teaching? If there are,what are the problems?In order to work out the 3 questions,the corpus-based approach is applied.The corpora used in the research are self-built,and they are named Database-p.txt and Database-c.txt.And another corpus is also built to compare with the Database-p.txt,which is named Database-c.txt.And in this research,Range is used to compare the difficulty and the coverage of vocabulary in the primary English textbooks(Xiangshao Edition)against the junior high school English textbooks(PEP Edition).As to the third question,a questionnaire is applied.The detailed findings are as follows:First,there is a slight difference in the sizes of vocabulary in the 2 sets of books.But more low-frequency vocabulary appears in the primary English textbooks(Xiangshao Edition)and the words are reiterated less,which means,the words are more difficult for students to learn.Second,28.56% of vocabularies in the primary English textbooks(Xiangshao Edition)are not in the list of English Curriculum Standards.Third,the coverage of the 2 sets of textbooks are compared.And 49.09% of the types in the Xiangshao textbook are reiterated in the PEP textbook.However,more types are reiterated in 7B textbook than in 7A textbook.The lexical transition from primary school to junior high is not smooth,which will cause a big gap between students of different levels.Fourth,the teachers generally believe that lexical transition between primary English textbooks and junior high English textbooks is very important.However,teachers haven't put enough attention on this lexical transition in practical teaching.They do not have enough knowledge about vocabularies of these two textbooks,and there are not enough experience exchanging activities.Or even there is one,it is formalistic.The lexical transition between these two books is not smooth.It has bad influence on the learning of English in different grades.It lowers the students' learning efficiency and asks the teachers for higher personal ability to choose proper words to teach.Hence,teachers should pay more attention to the vocabulary selection and the textbook secondary development.As for the schools,more connection should be built between different schools,especially between the schools of different learning stages.Some limitations are unavoidable.The research doesn't discuss as many vocabularies as it can.Some vocabularies in the related sources of the textbooks are not discussed.