Measuring the Vocabulary of College General English Textbooks and English-medium Textbooks of Business Core Courses

http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v6n22009/hsu.pdf
Measuring the Vocabulary of College General English Textbooks and English-medium Textbooks of Business Core Courses

Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 2009, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 126–149 © Centre for Language Studies National University of Singapore

Abstract

This research aims to create two corpora, one for college General English (GE) textbooks used in Taiwan, and the other for English-medium textbooks for business core courses, to form a basis of comparison. The operational measures for analysis involved vocabulary size, vocabulary levels (distribution among the British National Corpus 1st–14th 1,000 high-frequency word families) and text coverage. Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List containing 570 word families (AWL 570) was chosen as one of the base word lists. The two corpora were lexically compared using Nation and Heatley’s (2002) RANGE software. The results show that approximately 49 to 415 interdisciplinary academic words can be learned from a GE reading textbook as opposed to 421–537 academic words from a business textbook. The business textbooks used a smaller vocabulary than the GE textbooks (the former converging at the 4,000–5,000 word levels versus the latter spreading among the 3,000–13,000 word levels). Beyond the top 2,000-word level and the AWL 570, a GE textbook can supply students with 190 to 1,327 new word families. It is hoped that the indices examined in this study will help English teachers to take into account the continuity of curriculum design while preparing General English and Business English teaching materials.