Do English Language Teaching materials offer the vocabulary that students need? A content-based analysis of three textbooks

Abstract

The two-faceted nature of lexical frequency as the overarching factor in determining communicative usefulness and in contributing to vocabulary learning should be taken into account in language teaching textbooks. These constitute a basic tool of the teachers’ repertoire in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) contexts. However, the number of textbooks’ lexical content analyses is not abundant and most of them yield non-positive results. The aim of the present study is to analyse the lexical profile of three wellknown English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks which belong to the same series and which are targeted at adult learners. The analysis examines which words are presented and how frequently they are included to verify whether such textbooks comply with the aforementioned two-faceted nature of lexical frequency. For that purpose, the amount of the lemmas, types and tokens and the frequency levels of the types of each textbook were computed by means of the computer programme RANGE (Nation, Heatley & Coxhead, 2002). Afterwards, the number of the lemmas of the three textbooks was a) matched with the number of lemmas assumed by The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (2001, 2017) in accordance with each textbook’s level and b) compared with the vocabulary growth rates (students’ lexical learning capacity) as determined by the specialised literature. Results showed that each textbook’s distribution of words per range was not entirely adequate in relation to their targeted levels of proficiency. Likewise, the textbooks exceeded the number of lemmas to be learnt from the perspective of both the quantitative requirements of the CEFR and learning rates. These results point to a certain authors’ pedagogical manipulation of the lexicon to comply with editorial space restrictions, which entails distorting the normal patterns of lexical distribution of texts.