The Corpus based evaluation of basic vocabulary in terms of the selection and gradation in english textbooks
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Date
2015
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university of Oum-El-Bouaghi
Abstract
This dissertation is concerned with the analysis of first and second year algerian middle school textbooks the former entitled spotlight one and the second spotlight two, this was as an attempt to describe the fact that whether vocabulary frequency is respected in the textbooks or not. The main suitable mean of research was a corpus designed to meet the aim of this study. Additionally, as English is a foreign language in Algeria and the learners at an early stage of acquiring the aspects of the target language, vocabulary as one of these aspects, then it is obvious that they face a difficulty to be exposed to an amount of new items. On the basis of some researches which reflect the idea to carry out this study which is about the repetition of vocabulary and making the learners encounter the items several times, enable them to acquire it. Also, the words that have a high frequency in the English language should be emphasized in the textbooks and they should keep the same frequency as they are in their natural language. The study was based on analysing the whole items of the textbooks in terms of the selection, in which their selection was related to their frequency in overall the textbooks then a sample of words was selected in terms of their ranking and frequency, these words have been compared with a chosen list which includes the top most 5000 most frequent words. Besides, another element that has been analysed is that the gradation of vocabulary in both textbooks a sample of the top ten frequent words of different types have been chosen according to their high frequency among the other words in the first textbooks, then their graduation from the first file till the seventh file of the spotlight one and the same procedure was followed in the analysis of the second textbook i.e. analysing the graduation of the chosen items from the first file till the fifth one. The comparison between both textbooks was to describe the development of the vocabulary frequency and the way of recycling words in both of them. The results showed that some items their selection and gradation were reasonable and others the opposite.
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Teaching : english language : textbook : (Algeria)