A corpus-based analysis of the vocabulary levels of English II and EBS college entrance examination preparation coursebooks

고등학교 「영어 II」와 EBS 「수능 연계 교재」의지문에 사용된 어휘 수준에 관한 연구

The study attempted to address two questions: (1) What are the vocabulary levels of English II and EBS college entrance examination preparation books? and (2) How many word families cover 95% or 98% of the running words in the two types of books? Passages from four English II textbooks and one EBS examination preparation book were compiled into corpora, each of which consisted of 6,000 tokens. The corpora were analyzed using VocabProfile. On the average, English II was found to use 1,037 word families while the EBS book used 1,236. Academic vocabulary accounted for 3.54% and 5.79% of the tokens in the average textbook and the examination preparation book, respectively. To reach 95% text coverage, students were required to know 2,897 and 3,323 word families for the average textbook and the EBS book, respectively. These findings strongly suggest that there is a wide gap between the textbooks and the test preparation book in vocabulary level, and the implications of the findings are discussed.