A comparison of vocabulary items in eighth grade English coursebooks
Abstract
This study aims to analyze vocabulary items in the eighth grade English coursebooks used in Turkey and to compare their frequencies with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), British National Corpus (BNC), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and Academic Word List (AWL). Additionally, we extracted the most frequent 50 verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The results revealed that the most frequent verbs were do, is are; the most frequent adjectives were correct, short, natural, great, good, new, social, first, favorite and the most frequent adverbs were then, really, there, here, very, always, too, well, more, usually and often. Touchstone 2 mostly corresponded to the CEFR A2 level, BNC’s and COCA’s first 2000 lists, while others had less satisfactory inclusion percentages. When we compared the coursebooks with AWL, Upswing English had the highest inclusion percentages. Although Touchstone 2 seems to have the highest inclusion percentages, all coursebooks should consider this study’s results to revise their vocabulary selection.
Keywords
vocabulary items, word frequency, coursebooks, corpus-based study
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