The Repetition of Chunks in Korean Middle School English Textbooks

Abstract

The current study aims to examine the use of chunks and the extent of repetition in Korean middle school English textbooks. Also, the number of chunks shared by three publishers is examined. To create the corpora, 9 textbooks from three publishers were filed and processed by Simple Concordance Program. The results showed that chunk expressions were repeated 3.6 times on average. Most collocations occurred only one to two times throughout the same series of textbooks. Fixed-expressions showed similar results to those of lexical expressions, while semi-fixed expressions were shown relatively higher frequency rate than the other chunks. Regarding the repetition of chunks, most chunks were reused over 2 or 3 units. The number of chunks shared by three publishers in common was not many. It can be inferred that there were no agreed criteria for the selection and repetition of chunks among the textbook writers. The national curriculum works as a guideline, but the process of selecting items seems to be highly subjective and conducted without the consideration of repetition rate.

A Corpus-based Analysis of Collocations in Korean Middle and High School English Textbooks

“…Thus, teaching materials for EFL learners also need to be assessed on the repetition and frequency they give to individual collocation types. Results of previous research, however, vary in such assessments; some researchers observed that textbooks tend to provide a limited amount of collocation repetition (Tsai, 2015;Lee, 2015), while others report the opposite trend (Shin, 2019).…”

“…Unlike the curriculum wordlist, which has been continuously revised to improve its representativeness based on highly objective criteria, such as word frequency, range, and teacher ratings for item familiarity (Lee & Shin, 2015), only marginal attention has been paid towards the development of a curriculum-related, statistically verified collocation list exploiting a large-scale reference corpus data. A few researchers (Lee, 2009(Lee, , 2015Shin, 2019) have thus called for the need to establish curriculum guidelines and objective criteria to select pedagogically meaningful collocations. Research has also pointed out the restricted collocation repertoire in textbooks, for example, limited in their diversity of Part of Speech (POS) types (Kim, 2004;Shin, 2019), complexity (Shin, 2019), or the level of repetition (Lee, 2015;Tsai, 2015).…”

“…A few researchers (Lee, 2009(Lee, , 2015Shin, 2019) have thus called for the need to establish curriculum guidelines and objective criteria to select pedagogically meaningful collocations. Research has also pointed out the restricted collocation repertoire in textbooks, for example, limited in their diversity of Part of Speech (POS) types (Kim, 2004;Shin, 2019), complexity (Shin, 2019), or the level of repetition (Lee, 2015;Tsai, 2015). These findings suggest that distributing collocations in an appropriate and principled way in pedagogical materials is as important as providing a sufficient number of target items for their effective acquisition.…”

The Treatment of Collocations in English Textbooks for Vietnamese Students

“…A few studies have investigated collocational profiles and the recycling of targeted collocations in EFL textbooks (Lee, 2015;Tsai, 2015;Wang & Good, 2007). In a study examining a three English textbook series used in Korean middle schools, Lee (2015) found that verb-noun collocations were used twice in the whole series.…”

“…A few studies have investigated collocational profiles and the recycling of targeted collocations in EFL textbooks (Lee, 2015;Tsai, 2015;Wang & Good, 2007). In a study examining a three English textbook series used in Korean middle schools, Lee (2015) found that verb-noun collocations were used twice in the whole series. Wang and Good (2007) tabulated verb-noun collocations in Taiwanese high school textbooks and found that 80% of collocations was repeated only 1 to 5 times through the whole series of textbooks.…”