Chapter I Introduction
This research is a corpus-based case study of the vocabulary coverage andgrading in the New Senior English for China compiled by specialist panels of thePeople’s Education Press et al. The set of 11 textbooks was published in 2006 and isnow widely used in China’s senior middle schools.
1.1 Background of the current research
English is not used in China except for road signs. As a result, middle-schoolEnglish textbooks serve as the most important source of language data students areexposed to. In fact, course books are nearly the sole input for students in theirattempts to acquire knowledge of the English language and learn how to use it intrans-cultural communications. According to estimation, 98 percent of the Englishlanguage data students have access to in class is found in their textbooks. Thereforemuch attention is given to textbook compilation and evaluation. Since the release ofthe Full-time General Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards in 2003,quite a number of senior middle school English textbooks have come out to enrich theEnglish teaching corpus for senior middle schools. In this situation, teachers ofEnglish wonder whether a particular set of textbooks really facilitate L2 acquisition ornot when they are faced with the difficult task of textbook selection. Thus wiselyevaluating textbooks becomes one of the urgent tasks for middle school Englishteachers and scholars specializing in applied linguistics as well.Along with the advancement of education reform in China, the EducationMinistry issued the Full-time General Senior Middle School New English CurriculumStandards (New Curriculum Standards hereafter) in 2013 to regulate Englisheducation. As a result, old teaching methods and materials ungrounded on TESL andSLA theories have become very unpopular in senior middle schools. But this poses anew problem. Faced with an array of textbooks published in the 21stcentury, teachersof English, who are more conscious of advantages and disadvantages of textbooks,begin to wonder which one best meets their students’ needs. This is a question whichpuzzles not only teachers of English but academic management of senior middleschools as well. Nowadays, the New Senior English for China is being widely used inInner Mongolian senior middle schools, and there have been few negative feedbacksso far. That is to say, teachers and students have already accepted the set of textbooks.However, should we rely solely on subjective judgments of students and teachers inevaluating textbooks or should we seek a scientific method to testify the validity oftheir judgments? What are the specific advantages and drawbacks of the set oftextbooks? The answer to these questions is obvious. Intuitive judgments are not asreliable as empirical studies. Not only do statistics speak louder than personalimpressions, but they can also pin down specific advantages and/or disadvantages of aparticular set of textbooks.
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1.2Aim of the current project
Textbooks can be evaluated from various angles such as authenticity of languagedata, suitability of topics or design of activities, etc. Apart from those, textbooks canalso be studied from the structuralist perspective. That is to say, textbooks can beviewed as an embodiment of language features that can be examined one by oneseparately. For instance, textbook evaluators can investigate the coverage of vocabulary, or the sequencing of grammar elements, or the presentation of idioms, orarrangement of sentence patterns, etc. in a set of textbooks. D. A Wilkins (1972)emphasizes the priority of vocabulary over grammar when he says, “Properconsideration will have to be given from the beginning to the appropriatevocabulary …” (112). In a foreign language environment (which differs considerablyfrom the second language environment), reading by far outweighs listening as achannel of linguistic input, and adequate command of vocabulary is the prerequisitefor effective reading as well as enhancement of linguistic competence andcommunication skills. Therefore vocabulary is more important than grammar andother linguistic components at earlier stages of English learning, which include thesenior middle school period. Following this train of thought, I choose to study thevocabulary coverage and sequencing in the 5 books of New Senior English for China.This leads us to the issue of the principle of vocabulary selection. As early as1972, D. A. Wilkins proposed, “The most frequent vocabulary is presumably thatwhich individuals feel most need for” (112), and regarding low-frequency words, hestated, “There is no point in diverting the learner’s energies on to fruitless labor”(113). Many other applied linguists have made similar remarks, too. Abiding by therationale that the most frequently used lexical items are most urgently needed bymiddle school students, I adopt, as a yardstick, the three most frequently used Englishword lists constructed by Paul Nation incorporated as part of the statistical softwarenamed RANGE. I decide to compare the 5 textbooks’ vocabulary with Nation’s liststo see how the two categories match one another. I know that previous researchershave done much work comparing textbooks’vocabulary with base-word lists providedin the national New Curriculum Standards.As they have already come up with a lot ofmeaningful discoveries, I won’t find myself in a vantage point while repeating thesame kind of research.
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Chapter II Literature Review
This research is to find out whether the vocabulary in a textbook is selectedaccording to frequency of its appearance in daily life, because not all lexical items areequally useful to learners. The more frequently used words are more urgently neededby second language learners. Two theoretical beliefs of ESL are involved in thisresearch. The first is Krashen’s input theory and the second the learner needsproposition.
2.1 Theoretical concepts involved
The concept of learner needs analysis began to draw people’s attention during the1970s. At first, it developed alongside the introduction of the communicativeapproach to language teaching. It has been especially closely associated with the fieldof ESP (English for Special Purposes). In ESP, efficiency and utility of languageteaching are emphasized, so learner needs analysis is called as a necessary part ofcurriculum design and a prerequisite for the development of a syllabus for languageteaching. According to Richterich (1983), learner needs analysis “consists primarily incompiling information both on the individuals or groups of individuals who are tolearn a language and on the use they are expected to make of it when they have learntit” (2). In other words, learner needs analysis is a process in which a language to belearnt is broken down into components, and the specific components of a language aresingled out as being particularly useful for a certain group of learners, based on anunderstanding of what practical use they are to be put to. After such analysis, theconstituents will be graded and sequenced to be used as guidelines for curriculumdesign and syllabus formulation before language data containing those ingredients areoffered to students as teaching materials.
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2.2 Recent publications related to the current research
This part of the thesis mainly surveys studies on evaluation of Englishtextbook vocabulary published inside China. There are two reasons for doing so. First,the current research is about evaluation of vocabulary in English textbooks used inChinese middle schools, so foreign publications on vocabulary evaluation oftextbooks published not for Chinese students are not terribly relevant. Second, thereview of Chinese scholarship on English textbook vocabulary incorporates appraisalsof different foreign theoretical schools in this area so that not only an overview offoreign theoretical principles is provided, but judgments based on latest TESL theoriesare also presented to uplift readers of this thesis onto a higher plane of viewpoint.
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Chapter III Research Design....17
3.1 Research Questions............17
3.2 Research Subjects and Research Procedure....17
3.3 Research Instruments.........19
Chapter IV Results and Discussion......23
4.1 Results of the study............23
4.2 Discussion of the results....28
Chapter V Conclusion.......44
4.1 Major Points.............44
4.2 Limitations of the current research........46
4.3 Suggestions for future research in this area....46
Chapter IV Results and Discussion
This chapter is mainly a presentation of the empirical investigation results anddiscussions on vocabulary coverage and grading in the set of chosen textbooks. Theresults include the percentage of each textbook’s vocabulary overlap with Nation’stwo base-word lists and each book’s ratio of overlaps with Nation’s two lists. Theformer is the textbooks’ vocabulary coverage rate and the latter gives usefulinformation concerning the five textbooks’ vocabulary grading, or sequencing. Basedon the acquired data, I will analyze the implications the data hold out for Englishvocabulary selection in senior high-school textbook compilation.
4.1 Results of the study
The RANGE software requires its users to make a corpus of whatever texts to becompared with Nation’s three base-word lists. So the five chosen textbooks are inputone by one into the computer before RANGE can process and compare them. Thecomparison results of the first book are shown in the following table.Table 4.1.1 provides the data which show Book 1’s vocabulary coverage of eachof the three base-word lists offered by Nation. First of all, some explanations areneeded here. In the column of WORD LIST, Nation’s three base-word lists arerepresented as one, two and three. Beyond that, “not in the lists” means the numbershowing in this category is that of words which aren’t found in any of Nation’s threebase-word lists. To put it another way, it is the number of words which are consideredmore sophisticated than the essential English really needed by students belowpostgraduate level of studies in English-speaking countries.As token entails repetitions of the same word form, it is less significant to theresearch than type. So the discussions mainly focus on type. Table 4.1 shows that1103 types of textual words in Book 1 are from the base-word List One, and these1103 types make up 58.18 percent of the total textual words in Book 1. As for ListTwo, Book 1’s overlap number is 294 and overlap percentage 15.51. With regard toList Three, Book 1’s overlap number is 63 and overlap percentage 3.32. Consideringthat the first two lists contain the most frequently used words in daily life, 58.18percent and 15.51 percent are added to make 73.69 percent. That is to say, 73.69percent of the vocabulary in Book 1 is the essential English needed to cope with dailylife in English-speaking countries. As there is no cognitive science based base-wordrate for foreigners available, this is a pretty good vocabulary coverage to commonsense, because if nearly 74 percent of the vocabulary our senior high school studentsare exposed to is most frequently used daily English words, they haven’t wasted toomuch time internalizing useless knowledge. However, there are still 436 types and 23percent of words not found in Nation’s base-word lists. If those words rarely appeareven in native-speaking communication, are they really necessary for our senior highschool students? This is a question that will be dealt with later in the thesis.#p#分页标题#e#
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Conclusion
The present study is an empirical investigation of vocabulary in the fivetextbooks of New Senior English for China based on corpus linguistics. The softwareRANGE is used as the research instrument, for it contains three base-word lists putforward by Paul Nation. The first list of 1000 words is claimed to contain the mostfrequently used words by the English speech community. The second list contains thenext 1000 most frequently used words while the third list carries the still next 1000most frequently used words. As the first two lists contain words of pre-college levelproficiency in English-speaking countries, they are used as a yard stick to judgewhether the set of given textbooks shows a wise vocabulary coverage and some kindof vocabulary grading. Apart from the statistical study involving Nation’s twobase-word lists, lexical items in the textbooks but not on Nation’s lists and those onNation’s lists but not found in the textbooks are classified and examined to dig outtheir implications for middle school textbook compilation in the future.The first discovery in response to the first research question concerns thetextbooks’ vocabulary coverage. Roughly 70 percent of vocabulary in each textbookoverlaps with lexicon on Nation’s first two base-word lists. That is to say, 70 percentof the textbooks’ vocabulary is most frequently used words in daily life. This is apretty good textbook presentation of early-stage vocabulary according to He Ping.The second discovery in response to the second research question concerns thetextbooks’ vocabulary grading. There is roughly a 4 percent vocabulary change frombook to book involving decrease of List-One words and increase of List-Two words.Although 4 percent change cannot be called big enough, it is still noticeable change.As no specific percentage has been given by researchers regarding each book’s paceof advancement in vocabulary grading, it becomes a topic for future research.
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References (abbreviated)
