Summary: | 碩士 === 玄奘大學 === 應用外語學系碩士班 === 101 === The purposes of this study are to do the researches on the vocabulary size and levels of the high schools English textbooks in Myanmar. By comparing to the College Entrance Examination Center in Taiwan English Word List (EWL) which was analyzed and addressed by Cheng (2002), the worldwide word lists—General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL), the vocabulary size and levels of the high school English in Myanmar could be disclosed and discovered. The main sources of the data were the most widely used textbooks in public high schools and published by the government of ministry of education of Myanmar.
The analysis of the data shows as the following: (1) There are 28,868 tokens in Grade 10 and 35,762 tokens in Grade 11, (2) Grade 10 has a vocabulary size of 2,085 word types and has 2,678 types of vocabulary size in Grade 11, (3) Grade 10 contains 1,930 EWL words and Grade 11 includes 2,351 words. Obviously, the word level of Grade 11 is higher than Grade 10 and the combination of word sizes in the two lower levels, level 1 (32.7%) and level 2 (23.5%), are higher than the rest of the other levels, (4) there are 146 (25.6%) AWL words have occurred in Grade 10 and 180 (31.6%) have appeared in Grade 11 and (5) Grade 10 covers 1,314 (57.5%) GSL words and 1,425 (62.4%) words of GSL are founded in Grade 11.
In this study, the results show that the vocabulary size and levels of the textbooks are well below the level needed to cope with the college entrance examination. The findings might incite the students’ attention to the issue of vocabulary size and levels in English textbooks. This study may also assist English teachers can furnish complementary materials that include extra vocabulary word types so as to their students will have obtained large amount of vocabularies. Finally, the study can assist as an important reference for the government of ministry of education in Myanmar to become more prudent of the vocabulary size and the word levels while reorganizing or composing new textbooks.
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