| Summary: | 碩士 === 南臺科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 107 === The 12-year curriculum guidelines of basic education of Taiwan are now on the road. The essential principle in English education is to make students learn the key knowledge in different fields via English.
The present study is primarily a corpus-based analytical investigation of a well-known scientific children book series “The Magic School Bus.” This series can not only enhance students’ English proficiency but also provide rich natural science knowledge to the readers. Corpus analytical tools including AntConc and AntWordProfiler are used to analyze the corpus of the book series. In addition, R language coupled with RStudio, the most popular Graphical User Interface (GUI) for R, and Chi-square are employed to do the statistical analysis to address the relationship between the word frequency and the word category. Via the preceding corpus analytical tools and statistical language and test, this study is aimed to find out (1) the most frequently used words with at least 12 repetitions in The Magic School Bus; (2) the proportion of the word category and the relation between the frequency levels of the content words and the word category in The Magic School Bus; (3) the lexical coverage of The Magic School Bus by the MOE 1,200-word list; (4) the percentage of the words appears more than 12 times in The Magic School Bus that are covered by the MOE 1,200-word list.
The results of the study are stated in the following: (1) 755 words in The Magic School Bus show up for more than 12 times. Among the 755 words, 626 of them are content words; (2) the non-high-frequency nouns in The Magic School Bus are significantly higher than expected; (3) in terms of the lexical coverage, 85.3 % of words in The Magic School Bus are covered by the MOE 1,200-word list; (4) the MOE 1,200-word list covers 79.6 % of the occurring-12-time words.
The present study provides some pedagogical implication to the English teachers in Taiwan, especially for those who want to promote learning other school subjects in English. Besides, the corpus-based analyses also suggest that The Magic School Bus is the suitable scientific reading material for the secondary school students in Taiwan when they know most of the words in the MOE 1,200-word list.
|
|---|
