A Study of Target Word Exposure Frequency in One Series of Senior High School English Textbooks in Taiwan
Repeated exposures with six times as the minimum to a word have been accepted for L2 learners to facilitate retention; however, few studies verify their implementation in published textbooks in Taiwan. This study intended to investigate the exposure frequency of target words in a popular series of English textbooks for senior high schools in Taiwan. All the target words underwent manual lemmatization and were analyzed in ad hoc corpora consisting of the textbook contents by corpus analyzing program RANGE32 and spreadsheet EXCEL. The results show: (a) less than half of the target words (41.33％) in each Book qualify the minimum exposure frequency of six times agreed among vocabulary professionals, (b) the most frequently repeated words following (545 counts), topic (237 counts), complete (219 counts), paragraph (194 counts), and cause (178 counts) are commonly found in instructions, (c) one-tenth of the target words (12.67％) are repeated least frequently in each Book and they only appear two times: once in the entry and the other in the example in the vocabulary section, (d) half of the target words in Book I (49.85％) appear across all the six books but only 0.78％ of those in Book VI do, and less than half of the target words (43.61％) occur in all the subsequent Books but one-fifth of the target words (21.49％) are absent in all the subsequent Books. It is obvious that the target words in this popular series of textbooks do not receive enough treatment in terms of exposure frequency. Before textbook compilers and publishers recognize the fact that more than half of the target words are not repeated to the minimum retention-facilitating frequency and one-fifth of them are not recycled in any of the subsequent Books, language teachers are encouraged to create vocabulary activities that engage high school students in deep-processing new words in classes and to help them review these words in the subsequent semesters.
Lo-Li Huang Chih-Cheng Lin
National Taiwan Normal University
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
323-331
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）