서강대학교

초록/요약

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether and how vocabulary listed in high school English textbooks help develop students？ speaking proficiency. Vocabulary lists in 8 textbooks are compared against three corpora - Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), General Service List (GSL) and Academic Word List (AWL) ？ for the evaluation. The result showed that coverage rate between the ？basic vocabularies？ recommended by the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development and COCA & GSL were approximately 62% and 78% each, which are fairly high. However, when the coverage of high frequency words were compared with the ？new words？, which are the vocabularies suggested in the back of each textbook, the percentage varied from about 3% to 60%. Based on the above results, four additional steps are taken in the research. First, the ？new words？ of the textbooks were compared with the COCA and GSL. Similar to the preliminary analysis, the coverage rate varied with great gap between the highest and the lowest. The variation was assumed to be resulted from the number of words suggested by each textbook and additional evaluation was required to find out whether the vocabularies that are used in the textbooks are efficient. Second, the textbooks were divided into two groups: Practical English Conversation and Advanced English Conversation. GSL was used to analyze the dialogues since the GSL is composed of general spoken and written languages. As a result to the second analysis, high percentage of vocabularies in the dialogues conformed to the ones of GSL？s first 2,000 frequent words. The rate was over about 70 percent to 85 percent thus confirming the prior research that most of the general texts are composed of at least 80 percent of the 2,000 frequent words and they are enough amounts of words for a colloquial conversation. Third, the coverage rates of academic words in the textbook dialogues were fairly low (e.g. the lowest rate of 1.42 percent and 1.81 highest) even when compared with the percentage of the words that are not included in the GSL. It is assumed that the reason for such result is because the textbooks are not for learning a specific academic field but for learning a language itself. Finally, all the results from the analyses were added up for comparison to find out the efficiency of the vocabularies in the textbooks. It was shown that the vocabularies in the dialogues are composed of the vocabularies which are found to be efficient but the vocabularies which are to be newly learned by the students were of low use in English spoken country. In conclusion, choosing the useful words for use in the textbooks for the goal of communication and selecting the new words for the students to learn additionally is also a task which should be considered as an important factor for language learning students.