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.

The present study examines the features of communicative functions in middle school English textbooks, identifying whether or not they are presented based on the spiral structure. It also compares the communicative functions of 15 different middle school English textbooks and investigates whether the National English Listening Tests (NELTs) reflect the communicative functions presented in the textbooks. Two corpora were compiled using the 15 middle school English textbooks and the NELTs, and they were analyzed using WordSmith Tools. The results show that all the textbooks included communicative functions that the National Curriculum recommends; however, the textbooks presented a limited number of functions. Nonetheless, the communicative functions were presented relatively in a spiral way. The majority number of communicative functions in the textbooks and the NELTs were similar to each other, but there were some functions in the tests that were not covered in the textbooks. These results imply that more diverse communicative functions should be included in textbooks in order to help improve students’ communicative competence. The communicative functions not presented in the textbooks should not be included in the NELTs.

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.

This study analyzed English words that are used in the middle school English text books of the 6th and the 7th National Curriculum in Korea. For this analysis, an English corpus of a total of 1,230,023 nodes was built out of 63 English textbooks of the 6th and the 7th National Curriculum. The study specifically investigated the following items for analysis: 1) tokens and types of words used in the middle school textbooks, 2) frequency of the words, and the numbers of new words introduced in each school-year, 3) high-frequency words in the textbooks with reference to those in large-scale general English corpora, 4) parts of speech of the words and their frequencies, and 5) the comparison of the words used in reading parts and listening parts. Analysis of the corpus revealed the following results. Regarding the average number of tokens and types, the textbooks based on the 7th Curriculum contain more than those based on the 6th Curriculum. As for the frequency of the repetition of words, the 6th curriculum textbooks are more than the 7th curriculum textbooks. Comparison of vocabularies used in the text corpus and in general large-scale English corpus shows that there are more similarities than differences.

본 연구는 2015 개정 교육과정을 기반으로 개발되어 사용되고 있는 중등학교 영어 교과서의 읽기 지문에 나타난 고빈도 어휘 뭉치(lexical bundles)의 유형과 특성을 고찰하고, 어휘 뭉치가 갖는 구조적, 기능적 특징을 살펴보고자 한다. 또한 원어민 참조 코퍼스와의 비교·분석을 통해 어떠한 차이가 있는지를 알아보고자 한다. 이를 위해 2015 개정 교육과정 중·고등학교 영어 교과서의 읽기 지문을 코퍼스로 구축한 후 고빈도 어휘 뭉치를 비교·분석하였으며, 그 결과는 다음과 같다. 첫째, 중학교 교과서에 비해 고등학교 교과서의 읽기 지문이 다양한 내용과 더 많은 양의 텍스트를 다루므로 예상대로 더 많은 어휘 뭉치가 출현하였으며, 어휘 다양성 또한 높은 것으로 확인되었다. 둘째, 어휘 뭉치의 구조적 분석을 통해 동사구 결합 유형의 비율이 가장 높은 중학교 읽기 지문은 구어 담화적인 성격을 지녔으며, 전치사구 결합 유형의 비율이 높은 고등학교 읽기 지문은 학술적인 글의 특성을 지녔음을 알 수 있었다. 셋째, 중·고등학교 교과서 어휘 뭉치의 기능적 분석 결과 지칭 표현 기능의 어휘 뭉치가 70% 이상의 높은 비율을 차지하였는데, 이는 교과서 읽기 지문이 문어적 특징을 지녔음을 보여준다. 한편, 중학교 교과서의 고빈도 어휘 뭉치 유형이 고등학교 교과 서에서 나타나지 않는 경우가 있었고, 원어민 코퍼스에서 빈도 높게 쓰인 표현이 교과서에서는 쓰이지 않은 경우와 원어민들의 사용 빈도에 비해 교과서에서의 사용 빈도가 지나치게 높은 어휘 뭉치도 있었다. 이는 영어 학습자들이 영어를 이해하고 표현하는 의사소통 능력을 꾸준히 향상시 킬 수 있도록 어휘와 어휘 뭉치 표현이 학년별, 학교급별 연계와 위계를 고려하여 반복적으로 접할 수 있도록 나선형으로 제시될 필요가 있으며, 실제 의사소통 상황에서의 활용 빈도와 중요도를 고려한 어휘 뭉치를 교과서에서 균형적으로 다룰 필요가 있다는 것을 시사한다.