This paper analyses the lexical verbs in the guided word list of the 2015 Revised English Curriculum and high school English textbooks on the basis of the high frequency 200 lexical verbs extracted from the core academic words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English [COCA]. Lexical verbs are key words in determining sentence structures and meanings. In particular, this research focuses on academic verbs the knowledge of which is important for EFL learners’ academic achievement. The following questions are dealt with in this paper: 1) What changes occur in the distribution of high frequency core academic verbs in the guided word list? 2) Which verbs are classified as career development and technical words? 3) What are the properties of the academic verbs used in the high school textbooks of <English>, <English I> and <English II> in terms of frequency? and 4) With regard to EFL learners’ vocabulary learning, why should we be concerned with academic verbs classified as elementary-level words? The findings reveal that 35% of the 200 core academic verbs are used in the series of high school English textbooks, which means that a thorough learning of the general lexical verbs is important from a pedagogical perspective in the EFL situation. Furthermore, a diverse use of more core academic verbs is required in high school English textbooks.

This study investigated the use of the amplifier very in high school English textbooks and native corpora by comparing its frequency distributions and collocation patterns. The native corpora, used as the reference of the study, were COCA and BNC, with their built-in sub-corpora further grouped into spoken and written corpora. The High School English Textbook Corpus (HSETC) was compiled from a total of 53 high school textbooks, with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S) from the texts in listening and conversation and the written corpus (HSETC-W) from the reading passages. Analyses using AntConc3.4.4 revealed no prominent differences between HSETC and reference corpora in the frequency of the amplifier very, while the written corpus (HSETC-W) had more occurrences contrary to the native corpora. The combination patterns and their occurrences of HSETC were slightly different from those of COCA and BNC with the gap increased with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S). Pedagogical implications and suggestions are made on ELT materials development and teaching practices.

This study aims to compare the English vocabulary used in Korean high school English textbooks with the one in the College Scholastic Ability Tests (afterwards CSAT) administered in the years of 2009-2013 by using a concordance program, NLPTools, and to make a list of vocabulary used only in CSAT. The findings are as follows: First, when compared with Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, the 'Basic Words List' shows a conformity rate of 98.78%. Second, in terms of TTR (Type Token Ratio), there is no noticeable difference among the English textbooks. Third, in the respect of TTR, CSATs show higher figures, which means that CSATs' vocabulary is more difficult than that in the English textbooks and that for CSATs, annually each test has shown a gradual increase in the number of valid types. (This shows that more valid types to be learned are needed for the preparation of CSAT. Also the degree of difficulty in CSAT is getting higher.) Lastly, the higher level of the 208 words which occur only in CSATs illustrates that the gap between the vocabulary level of textbooks and that of CSAT needs to be reduced for normalization of public education.

Textbook is very important in English learning and teaching. The goals of this paper are (i) to analyze the distributions of modal auxiliaries in middle school and high school English textbooks and (ii) to compare the analysis results with those of the general- purpose English corpora. Our study is based on Corpus Linguistics, and we are using corpus-analysis methods and tools in our research. In our study, we consider English textbooks as corpus texts and we will analyze them with NLPTools, which is a corpus- analyzing program. After we survey the distributions of modal auxiliaries, we will focus on a modal auxiliary can. We will examine not only syntactical distributions of a modal can but also semantic/functional distributions of this modal in English textbooks. In order to analyze the semantical distributions of can, we will use semantic tags and divide its semantic/functional category into three groups: ability, permission, and possibility. We will also divide the syntactic distributions into the nine verb phrase structures. After we closely examine the syntactic and semantic/functional distributions of a modal can, we will compare the analysis results with those of the LLC Corpus, the LOB Corpus, and the British National Corpus. Through the study, we want to show that the actual distributions and usages of a modal can in middle and high school English textbooks are a little different from those in other general-purpose English corpora.