Vocabulary in EFL Textbooks. A Contrastive Analysis against Three Corpus-Based Word Ranges

Abstract

Vocabulary teaching and learning is one the most important components in textbooks. Vocabulary knowledge is also frequently associated to language fluency. It is therefore important to investigate how textbooks present vocabulary, and how they comply with the conditions necessary for vocabulary learning. We will take into consideration three perspectives here: the conditions derived from cognitive processes of knowledge acquisition, the role of frequency in language and vocabulary learning and the distribution of new words throughout textbooks. The analysis of a specific EFL textbook and the comparison of the results against the rationale supporting the three perspectives mentioned above will reveal whether the textbook is suitable for efficiently reaching the goals regarding vocabulary teaching/learning.