A Qualitative Analysis of Lexical Appropriateness in Secondary School English Textbook Dialogues

This study seeks to compare the middle school English textbooks of the 2007 and 2009 national curricula in Korea with special attention to whether lexical items embedded in the textbook dialogues constitute appropriate language input. For this purpose, a total of 30 middle school English textbooks were assessed using native speaker expert judgments. The results show that the textbooks manifest a different array of lexical problems: near-synonyms, verbosity, vagueness, violation of situational constraints, and miscollocations. While near-synonyms, verbosity, and miscollocations occur in the textbooks of the 2007 and 2009 curricula, the violation of situational constraints occurs only in the textbooks of the 2007 curriculum and vagueness only in those of the 2009 curriculum. There has been no noticeable improvement from the 2007 to 2009 texts in the use of lexical items. It is also found that many lexical items manifest a lack of authenticity in that they are hardly acceptable to native English speakers. While some lexical problems are linked to the intrinsic properties of words in English, others are ascribed to semantic transfer from the L1. On the basis of the results, this study provides suggestions for the development of teaching materials.