| English textbooks are the main source of language input for foreign language learners,and reading is an important part of it.Reading texts have a large amount of language input and specific contexts.And vocabulary can’t exist in isolation,but is presented in a certain context.Therefore,it is important to explore the presentation of reading verbs in textbooks in specific contexts with the help of corpus tools.This study adopted a corpus-based research method and combines the corpus tool(Antconc 3.5.8)to conduct an in-depth analysis of verbs in the reading of the seven compulsory and optional compulsory of PEP senior high school English textbooks(2019 edition)in terms of both the breadth and depth of verbs,aiming to answer the following three questions:1)What is the breadth of verbs in the senior high school English textbooks?What is the repetition of the verb frequency list compared with native speakers’ BNC verbs?2)What is the frequency and recurrence of verbs in senior high school English textbooks?3)What are the colligation,collocations,semantic preference and semantic prosody of different types of verbs in senior high school English textbooks?The results showed that 1)in terms of verb breadth,the textbook reading text presented 886 verbs.The number of lexical morphemes gradually increased according to the books and formed a good gradient,but the growth of verb class characters in each textbook reading text was uneven and lacked a reasonable design of gradual and increasing number;2)in terms of the repetition of the verb word list in the textbook reading text and the BNC verb word frequency list,the repetition rate of the two was91%,and the textbook basically covered the high-frequency verbs in the native reading text;3)in terms of verb frequency and recurrence distribution,68% of the verbs were very infrequent,probably because it was difficult to recur the vocabulary multiple times due to the limitation of the word count and length of the text.Most of the top 50 verbs in the word frequency ranking were common basic words,while other complex and difficult verbs were presented very infrequently in the textbook;4)in terms of verb depth,the five verbs basically showed diverse meanings,collocations and colligations,but the distribution of feel and could grammatical paradigms was uneven,could and used semantics were presented extremely,take and did did not show positive or negative features of semantic prosody significantly.This study suggests that English teachers: 1)teach students the appropriate amount of vocabulary according to the requirements of the curriculum,focus on students’ vocabulary breadth knowledge,and conduct regular vocabulary assessments;2)strengthen students’ extracurricular reading to improve the recurrence rate of low-frequency words in the textbook;3)teach students’ vocabulary depth knowledge on purpose and consolidate it through a variety of exercises. |
