Exploring The (un)suitability Of The Amount Of Vocabulary Input In The Middle School Textbooks: A Critical Analysis Of The Amount Of Lexical Words In “my New Book Of English, Year One” And “my New Book Of English, Year Two”

Résumé: The importance of vocabulary in EFL learning is unquestionable. Arguably, an appropriate amount of vocabulary is eminently sensible for the construction of materials for EFL learners from the beginning. The present article aims at evaluating the suitability of vocabulary content in the Algerian Middle School textbooks “My New Book of English, Year One” (MBE1) and “My New Book of English, Year Two” (MEB2) focusing on the analysis of the amount of lexical words. The research was conducted to answer the research questions: (1) Is the amount of lexical words included in MBE1 suitable to first year middle school learners’ age and language level? (2) Is the amount of lexical words included in MBE2 suitable to second year middle school learners’ age and language level? (3) To what extent is the transition from a sequence to another within each textbook and from MBE1 to MBE2 appropriate? In order to answer these questions, corpora and sub-corpora of all lexical words in the sequences /textbooks were compiled. The analyses were done using computer software “Compleat Lexical Tutor” and manually when required. The findings revealed that the textbooks are lexically overloaded, especially MBE2. More specifically, the textbooks introduced a huge number of lexical words, of which most of them are not repeated/recycled sufficiently and of which a significant percentage consists of new/almost new words , which makes them unsuitable to the age and level of the students. Furthermore, the findings indicated that the transition from MBE1 to MBE2 on the one hand and the transition from a sequence to another, on the other hand, is totally ineffective: neither MBE2 as a whole is built on MBE1, nor each sequence is built on the previous sequence(s). Accordingly, it is quite obvious that the textbook writers did not pay adequate attention to the amount of vocabulary included, the frequency of lexical words within and across the textbooks as well as the rate of introducing new vocab and recycling old ones throughout the sequences.

Publié dans la revue: المجلة الجزائرية للأبحاث والدراسات