| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國語文研究所 === 99 === The study is aimed at investigating the vocabulary and the verb-noun collocations in English textbooks for senior high schools and the use of the vocabulary and collocations in English writing for senior high school students.
Two corpora are built for the investigation. The first corpus, referred to as Corpus Textbook, is composed of the six volumes of Sanmin English Reader for Senior High Schools, which, compared with other textbooks, is a constant winner of the largest market share in recent years. The second corpus, referred to as Corpus Writing, is composed of 175 example essays that are intended to serve as models for students. The words and verb-noun collocations are then extracted from these two corpora for comparison so as to ascertain how many of the words and collocations used in Corpus Writing can also be found in textbooks, and how many of them are beyond textbooks. The word list published by College Entrance Examination Center (CEEC) is also used as a criterion against which the words and collocates from the two corpora are measured so as to ascertain how these words and collocates are distributed across the six word levels of the CEEC word list.
A concordancer is first used to extract words from the two corpora. These words are manually lemmatized so as to be compared with each other and with the CEEC word list. This comparison will show how applicable to English writing textbook vocabulary is and how words for writing are distributed across the six word levels of the CEEC word list. Second, all verb-noun word combinations are extracted from these two corpora and are entered into COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) for the calculation of their mutual information (MI) scores. Combinations with MI scores above 3 will be classified as verb-noun collocations. After the two sets of collocations are identified, they are compared with each other. The results show that almost all the words used in Corpus Writing can be found in textbooks. The remaining words are proper nouns or derivatives or compounds easily understandable from their affixes or components. Yet about two thirds of textbook vocabulary is not found in Corpus Writing, which shows the vocabulary that English teachers expect and intend to train their students to use adeptly is far smaller than that offered by the textbooks. It seems that teachers should enhance students’ training by adding more diversity and depth to their writing so as to help students make fuller use of textbook vocabulary. As for the words for recognition and production, it has been found that words for recognition are hardly used in English writing, and fewer than 40% of words for production are found in Corpus Writing, which also means teachers should adequately train their students to put to practical use more words they learn from textbooks.
Investigation into collocations shows that one third of the verb-noun collocations in Corpus Writing are found in textbooks, and one eighth of the verb-noun collocations in textbooks are found in Corpus Writing. This means there is only a limited degree of overlap between these two sets of collocations. As a result, textbook authors should try to include more articles close to students’ life experiences, so as to offer more collocations useful for their writing. On the other hand, teachers should add more variety to the topics they design for students’ writing so that students can have the chance to use more of the textbook collocations.
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