The major goal of this study is to examine the vocabulary selection of senior high school English textbooks from the perspective of the Academic Word List. This chapter provides detailed descriptions of the research design of this study and consists of three major sections: data collection, instruments, and procedures and data analysis.
Data Collection
The Selected Senior High School Textbooks for Analysis
The senior high school English textbooks under analysis in this study are five major senior high school English textbook series that follow the 2010 curriculum guidelines for senior high schools. As stated in the 2010 curriculum guidelines, English textbooks for Grade-11 and Grader-12 students would differ in two versions:
the A version and the B version, in order to meet students’ different learning needs resulting from different language proficiency (MOE, 2009). The A version textbooks include only the “basic learning materials,” whereas the B version textbooks consist of both the “basic learning materials” and the “advanced learning materials.”
According to the curriculum guideline, the “basic learning materials” are the required learning materials for all senior high school students. Hence, the “basic learning materials” of the five textbook series are the focus of the analysis in this study.
The five different senior high school English textbook series published by four major English textbook publishers are in wide circulation in senior high schools in Taiwan. The five textbook series under analysis in this study are: Chen et al.’s
(2010-2013 edition) Far East English Reader for Senior High Schools (FEC), Shih et al.’s (2010-2013 edition) Far East English Reader for Senior High Schools (FES), Chou et al.’s (2010-2013 edition) Lung Teng English Reader for Senior High Schools
(LT), Chen et al.’s (2010-2013 edition) Nan-I English Reader for Senior high Schools (NI), and Che’s (2010-2013 edition) San Min English Reader for Senior High Schools (SM). Each textbook series is composed of six volumes, with the first four volumes often consisting of twelve lessons while the last two volumes containing only ten lessons with the exception of Che’s (2010-2013 edition) San Min English Reader for Senior High Schools, which include 12 lessons in the fifth volume.
In addition, Chen’s (2010-2013 edition) Nan-I English Reader also differ slightly in that the last four volumes (Books 3, 4, 5, 6) contain ten lessons as the
“basic learning materials” with two extra reading lessons as the “advanced learning materials for the third, fourth and fifth volume and one extra reading lesson as the
“advanced learning materials” for the last volume. Nevertheless, the “basic learning materials” of the B version of the five senior high school English textbook series share a similar core structure despite the fact that the “advanced learning materials”
parts of the five textbook series differ greatly from each other. Chen’s (2010-2013 edition) Far East English Readers for Senior High Schools include a reading text with glosses of vocabulary in each lesson across six volumes while Chen’s (2010-2013 edition) Nan-I English Readers for senior high school designed two reading-focused lessons as the “advanced learning materials.” Shi’s (2010-2013 edition) Far East English Readers for Senior High Schools also have three reading-focused lessons as the “advanced learning materials.” The “advanced learning materials” in Lung Teng series focus more on critical thinking development and training of productive
knowledge of the language. The “advanced learning materials” in San Min series are presented in the form of more in-depth discussion questions that facilitate the
cultivation of critical thinking skills, and project learning. No separate units or
highlights on vocabulary were designed for the “advanced learning materials” in Lung Teng and San Min series. Table 1 shows the sizes of lessons in the “basic learning
materials” of the five textbook series whereas Table 2 shows the sizes of lessons in the
“advanced learning materials” of the five textbook series.
Table 1
The Size of Lessons of the Basic Learning Materials in Each Textbook Series
FEC FES LT NI SM
The Size of Lessons with Vocabulary Marked for Advanced Learning Materials in Each Textbook Series
The “advanced learning materials” in five textbook series will not be included in this study as the five textbook series focused on different elements of language proficiency in their “advanced learning materials.” The sizes of vocabulary and the presentation of the new words in these “advanced learning materials” also differ (See Table 2 above). Hence, the appropriateness of fair comparison could be in question.
On the other hand, the “basic learning materials”, as stated in the curriculum
guidelines, are the required learning materials for all high school students and share similar structures across five textbook series. Therefore, it is more appropriate and
worthwhile to examine the vocabulary sections of the “basic learning materials” in this study.
The “basic learning materials” part in the five textbook series is organized in a similar structure, which includes a main reading text, post-reading questions and discussion, the vocabulary section, idioms and phrases section, sentence pattern section, and a writing section. The vocabulary section in the five textbook series is divided into two categories: words-for-production and words-for-recognition. New words listed in the “word-for-production” section are provided with phonemic transcription, definition in English, Chinese translation, and example sentences and are intended to facilitate students’ acquisition of these words to become the productive vocabulary. On the other hand, new words listed in the “word-for-recognition” section are simply provided with phonemic transcription, definition explained in English, and Chinese translation of the words and are intended to help students recognize the sound and meaning of the words with a view to enhance reading comprehension.
This study, the analysis of vocabulary selection of senior high school
textbooks from the perspective of the Academic Word List, includes both words for production and words for recognition. The reason is that discussion of comprehending academic texts involves the receptive vocabulary knowledge. New words from
“words-for-production” section can also facilitate the development of receptive vocabulary knowledge for reading comprehension. In addition, this study, which aims at identifying the academic words from the AWL in textbooks, does not involve the examination of different learning loads resulting from receptive and productive vocabulary. Therefore, new words from both the “words-for-production” section and
“words-for recognition” section can be combined together and regarded as an integral body for the academic word analysis.
Instruments
To analyze the vocabulary selection in the five senior high school textbook series from the perspectives of the Academic Word List, Web VocabProfile classic v.4 (Cobb, 2013) is the instrument employed in this study.
1. Web VocabProfile Classic v.4 (Cobb, 2013)
To investigate the academic words from Academic Word List that also appear in senior high school textbooks, Web VocabProfile classic v.4 (Cobb, 2013) is adopted for the analysis in this study. Web VocabProfile classic v.4 is a lexical text analysis program, which is adapted by Tom Cobb from the off-line RANGE program (Nation, et al. 2002). The program of RANGE/VocabProfile has been validated by Laufer and Nation (1995) and has been employed in numerous studies (Cobb & Horst, 2001b;
Hsu, 2011& 2014; Meara, Lightbown, & Halter, 1997; Schmitt & Schmitt, 2012).
The web version of RANGE, Web VocabProfile Classic v.4, allows users to view the input and output of the analyzed texts on the same page and provides an integral version of text with levels indicated by different colors rather than just lists of word token percentage across different levels. However, the web version of RANGE cannot process several texts at the same time and the size of input text file is limited to 30,000 characters. Similar to the idea of base word lists in RANGE, the latest Web version of RANGE, Web VP classic v.4, can identify the lexical frequency of the words in a text in four categories: (1) the most frequent 1,000 words of English (2) the second most frequent thousand words of English (3) the academic words from
Academic Word List (4) the remainders that could not be found in previous three lists (Cobb, 2013).
The main reason for choosing Web VocabProfile Classic v.4 arises from the fact that the Web version of RANGE has already prepared 10 sublists of the AWL as
its base word lists for processing the data. RANGE32 only has the ready-made base word list of the whole Academic Word List but not the sublists. To identify the academic words of the AWL that also appear on the senior high school English textbooks and investigate the amount of academic words on Sublist 1 and the first three sublists that also appear in the senior high school English textbooks, Web VocabProfile Classic v.4 is thus selected to be the instrument to be employed in this study.
Procedures and Data Analysis
This study aims to investigate the vocabulary selection from the perspectives of the Academic Word List. The research procedures would first start with the compilation of vocabulary data. All of the vocabulary items in
“words-for-production” and “words-for-recognition” sections in the five textbook series were typed in Excel with lemmas as the data selection criteria and then
converted into text files with proofreading and double checks to ensure the validity of the analysis. However, proper nouns were not included in this analysis. Proper nouns are often classified as low-frequency words among the four types of vocabulary in a text: high-frequency words, academic words, technical words, and low-frequency words (Nation, 2001). The compilation of word lists often does not involve proper nouns in general. The AWL does not include proper nouns in its list. Hirsh and Nation (1992) also argued that proper nouns were words that did not demand previous
learning for reading comprehension. They maintained that the meanings of proper nouns would automatically be revealed as the story progressed. For instance, when reading Alice in Wonderland, readers will gradually realize who Alice, White Rabbit, and Mad Hatter are as they continue reading the story. In addition, the initial
capitalized letters in proper nouns often clearly signals the function of the words. That
is, they are names of a person, a place, or an institution. Furthermore, as Rayson and Garside (2000) point out the importance of the “homogeneity within the corpora”
when conducting comparisons of corpora, this vocabulary selection analysis focuses on single words in English. Hence, the open-form compound words (e.g. basal tear, comic strip), which Francis and Kucera (1982) treated as series of two (or more) grammatical words, would not be included for the analysis. On the other hand, the closed-form compound words, which Francis and Kucera (1982) regarded as single words when compiling the Brown Corpus, were included in the analysis of this study.
Hyphenated compound words were not be included in the analysis as the Academic Word List consists of mostly single words except for the word item “so-called” and Web VocaProfile Classic v.4 would automatically compute one hyphenated compound word as two component words. Therefore, the examination of the academic word item
“so-called” was operated manually during the data compilation process. In the cases of the presentations of the open-form compound nouns, the component words are highlighted and introduced separately. For example, “field trip” is introduced in the
“words-for-recognition” section in San Min textbook series and the component word
“field” is introduced separately for its meaning. In cases like this, the highlighted component words were considered entries of single words and thus were included for vocabulary selection analysis. As for non-English words and non-words (e.g. suffixes as -related), they were excluded from this analysis.
Data analysis first began with the examination of size of vocabulary of academic words on the AWL in general and then target on the items from Sublist 1 and the first three sublists. Distributions of the academic words in the textbooks across volumes were then revealed. The academic words on the AWL yet not appearing in each textbook series were identified to make supplementary academic word lists complementary to each textbook series. In addition, the Basic 1200-word
List for junior high and elementary school students in Taiwan was also incorporated with each of the different set of textbook vocabulary data for vocabulary profile analysis in order to better understand to what extent the textbook series have prepared students for academic reading from the perspective of mastering the high-frequency 2000 words and academic words.