Lexical Analysis of Two ELT Coursebooks: Corpus-informed & Conventional Coursebook

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to examine the lexical profiles of two pre-intermediate level ELT coursebook titles commonly used in language classrooms. One coursebook is credited with being “corpus informed” while the other is published as a conventional coursebook with no special emphasis on its lexical selection. With the help of lexical frequency analyses, the study attempts to quantify the extent of their coverage of 2K high-frequency words from New General Service List (NGSL). Similarities and differences in the lexical frequency profiles of the books were investigated using corpus-based frequency analyses. For this purpose, a vocabulary profiler and frequency calculation tool were used. The resulting lexical profiling of the books revealed that the corpus-informed coursebook had a coverage of the most frequent 2K words of English (NGSL-1 and NGSL-2) at 74.2% level, while the conventional coursebook title had a coverage at 82.2% level. The lexical coverage of high frequency words in the corpus-informed book was counterintuitively found to be lower than the conventional coursebook. Again, the analyses of the type-token ratios and recycling rates of the lexical items in two coursebooks indicated that the corpus-informed book did not vary markedly from the conventional coursebook. From the analyses there emerged no indication of any “systematic approach” to lexical coverage and recycling of high frequency lexical items in the coursebook title published as ‘corpus-informed’ coursebook.