A Comparative Study Of Academic Vocabulary Coverage Of College English Textbooks And CET Test Papers

College English teaching before the reform has been regarded as EGP(English for General Purposes)teaching.With the reform of college English teaching comes the reform of college English test(CET-4 and CET-6).EAP(English for Academic Purposes)was listed as an important part of teaching and testing after the reform.However,up to now,there is a lack of empirical research to examine the coverage of academic vocabulary in college English teaching and testing to testify whether they belong to EGP teaching and testing.For this reason,this study makes a comparison and contrast between college English teaching materials and college English test papers from the perspective of academic vocabulary,and provides data support for college English teaching and testing with empirical data.According to Coxhead's(2000)research,the AWL coverage of Academic English is about 10%and that of General English is approximately 1.4%.Taking this as the reference,this study built a corpus of college English teaching materials and a corpus of college English test papers.The former contains four sets of college English teaching materials and the later contains a total of 168 reading comprehension passages of CET-4 and CET-6 from December 2013 to December 2016.Then,we used the Compleat Lexical Tutor to calculate the AWL coverage of each passage in teaching materials and test papers and saved the data for further analysis.The research results show that:(1)the AWL coverage of college English teaching materials is 3.79%,and that of CET is 7.17%.They are not highly correlated in AWL coverage.CET is much more academic than college English teaching materials in language.College English teaching materials is more inclined to EGP teaching materials and CET is more inclined to EAP test.However,they are neither typical EGP teaching materials nor typical EAP test but contain both the content of EGP and EAP.(2)The AWL coverage of the CET-4 is 6.64%,which is much higher than that of college English teaching materials.(3)The AWL coverage of CET-6 is 7.62%,which is nearly twice the AWL coverage of college English teaching materials.There is no significant correlation between the two in AWL coverage,either.(4)The AWL coverage of CET-6 is higher than that of CET-4,but there is no significant difference in AWL coverage between them.They are both inclined to be EAP test,but they are not typical EAP test.The research provides data support for college English teaching and testing reform,and it also provides references for teaching materials selection,teaching plan arrangement and teaching materials compilation.