A Study on the Vocabulary in Junior and Senior High School English Textbooks: Distribution, Frequency, and Overlapping

• Main Authors: Ya-lin Huang, 黃雅琳
• Other Authors: Dr. Shih-Guey Joe
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28103251745885616860

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 100 === In Taiwan, the main resource of learning English is textbooks. However, ever since Ministry of Education (MOE) issued the educational policy to decentralize textbook publication in 1999, there has been controversial discussion over the quality of commercial textbooks and the connection between different educational stages. In this context, junior and senior high school (JH and SH) English textbooks have been the concern of the recent studies (e.g. Lin, 2006, & Ding, 2008). In order to probe the appropriateness of the current JH and SH English textbooks for vocabulary learning, this study focused on three aspects of vocabulary: vocabulary distribution, word frequency and repetition and overlapping between JH and SH textbooks. All the versions of JH and SH textbooks published in the year 2010 were collected to see which versions fit into the criterion for ideal vocabulary learning. The findings of this study show that over 70 % of the words in JH textbooks (Book 1~Book 6) are within the range of General Service List (GSL). Among the five versions of JH textbooks, HL has the highest percentage (78.25%) of distribution in GSL, while H has the lowest percentage (72.32%).This indicates that HL contains the most commonly used words and might be the most beneficial for students to acquire high frequent words. As for the SH textbooks (Book 1~Book 2), NYS contains the highest percentage of distribution in GSL (74.41%) while FE contains the lowest (70.54%). Different from the JH textbooks, the SH textbooks have much higher percentage of distribution in Academic Word List (AWL), ranged from 7.1% to 5.13%, while the JH textbooks from 2.1% to 0.92%. Another finding of this study is that none of the JH and SH textbooks fit into Nation’s (1990) claim for effective vocabulary learning from the perspective of word repetition. The other finding is that the overlapping HS version of JH textbook and NYS version of SH textbook makes the greatest overlapping among the other versions. This result shows that HS version makes the best connection with NYS version since NYS version contains the most repetition of vocabulary from HS version. As for KH and FE version, they make the lowest degree of overlapping, which indicates that teachers and students have to make more efforts to bridge the gap. It is hoped that the findings of this study can be taken as useful reference for textbook editors, English teachers and students. Meanwhile, the continued research on the quality of English textbooks is also expected in the future.