The Typicality of Collocations in the Example Sentences in High School English Textbooks in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Hui-Lan Lee, 李蕙蘭
• Other Authors: Caroline C. Hwang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39yy95

碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系碩士班 === 102 === In Taiwan, an EFL environment, strong reliance on textbooks for English teaching and learning is inevitable. It is found that little research has been done on the example sentence (ES) in the vocabulary section in Taiwanese high school English textbooks. This thesis, therefore, aims to investigate the ESs in question, with a focus on the typicality of collocations embedded in these ESs. Two research questions are proposed: (1) How many ESs from the sample display collocational knowledge in Taiwanese high school English textbooks? and (2) What is the typicality of the collocations in the ES in high school English textbooks in Taiwan, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)? A quantitative approach is adopted to answer the two research questions, with COCA as a measuring instrument for the rank of each collocation of the ES. The sample is randomly chosen from the three most prominent versions of high school textbooks, published by Far East, Lungteng, and Sanmin respectively. The sampling process yields 353 ESs. Data analysis is conducted on these ESs. The positive results show that 58.36% of the sample contains collocational knowledge and that 76.34% of the collocations fall within the top 30 COCA ranks. The data have been analyzed and presented to show a deeper understanding of the collocational knowledge in EFL textbooks for book writers/publishers and the authorities concerned.