Book Description

A study of TEFL vocabulary contains an evaluation of the vocabulary encountered in 56 textbooks of English for Swedish secondary schools. The 56 textbooks together make up an electronically stored corpus of 1,437,474 words, which was evaluated from three points of view. were compared with the corresponding frequency band in an 18 million word corpus compiled at the University of Birmingham in the course of the work on the COBUILD dictionary. This comparison reveals clear differences between the two corpora, with the textbooks containing a much higher proportion of concrete everyday words than the COBUILD texts and a lack of many of the common abstract words need for an understanding of the language of the news media. of certain of the linguistic criteria for text typology suggested by D.Biber. With the help of these criteria, it was possible to show that the textbooks tend to be interactive and to have situated content and reported style, while the COBUILD texts seem to be edited, to have abstract content and more immediate style. in terms of the linguistic differences between British and American English. It was found that the linguistic orientation of both corpora is overwhelmingly British. described above, among them a list of the 9330 textbook lemmas with a fequency of 5 or more. Each lemma appears with its frequencies from the textbook and the COBUILD corpora and a difference coefficient indicating its relative frequency in the two corpora.