The Relationship Between Learners' Lexical Coverage
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PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research Ferhat Abbas University, Setif Faculty of Letters and Languages Department of English Language and Literature THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEARNERS’ LEXICAL COVERAGE AND THE READABILITY LEVELS OF THE ALGERIAN ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS By Saad TORKI Thesis submitted in candidature for the degree of doctorate “ès-sciences” in Applied Linguistics Supervisor: Prof. H. SAADI Co-Supervisor: Prof. M. MEHRACH Board of Examiners: Chairman: Prof. S. KESKES Prof. University of Setif Supervisor: Prof. H. SAADI Prof. University of Constantine Co-Supervisor: Prof. M. MEHRACH Prof. University of Tetouan, Morocco Member: Dr. H. HAMADA M.C. University of Constantine Member: Dr. S. LARABA M.C. University of Constantine Member: Dr. A. NEMOUCHI M.C. University of Constantine 2012 PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research Ferhat Abbas University, Setif Faculty of Letters and Languages Department of English Language and Literature THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEARNERS’ LEXICAL COVERAGE AND THE READABILITY LEVELS OF THE ALGERIAN ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS By Saad TORKI Thesis submitted in candidature for the degree of doctorate “ès-sciences” in Applied Linguistics Supervisor: Prof. H. SAADI Co-Supervisor: Prof. M. MEHRACH Board of Examiners: Chairman: Prof. S. KESKES Prof. University of Setif Supervisor: Prof. H. SAADI Prof. University of Constantine Co-Supervisor: Prof. M. MEHRACH Prof. University of Tetouan, Morocco Member: Dr. H. HAMADA M.C. University of Constantine Member: Dr. S. LARABA M.C. University of Constantine Member: Dr. A. NEMOUCHI M.C. University of Constantine 2012 DEDICATION To My mother To The memory of my father whose last words as he lay dying were: “My son, never quit learning”. The memory of my father and mother-in-law who helped me to heed my father's advice. To my sisters, To Afef - Zineb, Mohamed–Abdallah , Taki -Eddine, and their Mum To My brothers and sisters-in-law ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Allah for His innumerable graces on me, one of which is the completion of this work. Second, my most profound feelings and unspeakable, ineffable, and immense gratitude go to my mother who, though widowed at an early age, sacrificed her youth, life and energy and went out to work for my education. Third, the journey that produced this study owes much to many people. Some of them can be named, others cannot, but all of them have my deepest appreciation and deserve to be acknowledged for their support in this effort. I wish to convey my gratitude to my supervisor Professor. Hacene Saadi, Mentouri University, Constantine. I consider myself very fortunate and privileged to have conducted this research under his supervision. His comments and criticisms have played a vital part in the development of this work. I have a very special debt to him for the understanding and reassurance he gave me on many occasions I was about to give up. Without his unfailing support, kindness and ceaseless patience, this thesis would have never been written. A similar role was held by Professor Mohamed Mehrach, University of Tetouan, Morocco. I would like him to find here my most sincere thanks for his patient mentoring, guidance, support, assistance and hospitality. Special thanks are due to the members of the Board of Examiners who have kindly accepted to examine the present thesis. A bundle of thanks is also due to Mohammed Berrahal and Rafik Mosbah for their invaluable help and moral support. It would be remiss of me not to express my gratitude to Abdallah Khababa and Mabrouk Korichi for their contribution in the development of a software. Last but not the least, my deepest feelings go to my wife who constantly prodded me into working on this research, took on her all the responsibilities of the home in order to set me free me for research and who endured my bad temper when things went wrong. I want to convey to her - publicly - my gratitude and my apologies for having stolen time that was hers and for the so many times I have offended her. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for all the flaws and mistakes to be found herein. Abstract Key words: readability – lexical coverage –reading comprehension – EFL textbooks In Algerian schools, textbooks provide the major if not the only written lexical input for students in classrooms. This study examined the seven English as a Foreign Language textbooks in use in these schools in order to investigate their lexical coverage and readability. The research project was designed to i) compile a textbook corpus ii) compare lexical coverage of the textbooks, and iii) assess readability. The main concern was to determine whether learners‘ lexical coverage was at the textbook readability level (Independent Reading Leve), above it (Instructional Reading Level), or below it (Frustrational Reading Level). Furthermore, the list of all lexical items occurring in the seven textbooks was compared to West's General Service List, and Coxhead‘s Academic Word List to assess whether textbooks provide sufficient, useful and appropriate vocabulary items. Another purpose was to provide English teachers and educationalists in general with a means (computer software) for comparing the vocabulary levels of reading materials and textbooks destined to Algerian learners of English in order to determine what the readability and vocabulary levels are, and what additional vocabulary is required for students to reach the 95% rate of comprehension. The methodology adopted to explore the lexical coveragewas characterised by a multi- instrument computer-based approach involving computer software. The sets of textbooks were processed to generate textbook word lists. Results have shown that all the EFL textbooks in use have low lexical coverage and readability, putting them at the frustrational level. Moreover, except for the first three textbooks there was a total discrepancy in terms of lexical coverage between the other four textbooks as the rate of common vocabulary across the textbooks was very low. Comparison of the lexical coverage of the seven textbooks to standard vocabulary lists have revealed that Algerian students are not learning sufficient, useful and appropriate vocabulary, as Algerian learners are exposed to a low proportion of high frequency words. The study ends with implications and recommendations as to how remedy to the problem. i List of abbreviations 1 A.M: Première Année Moyenne (first year of the middle school). 1 A.S: Première Année Secondaire (first year of the secondary school). 2 A.M: Deuxième Année Moyenne (second year of the middle school). 2 A.S: Deuxième Année Secondaire (second year of the secondary school). 3 A.M: Troisième Année Moyenne (third year of the middle school). 3 A.S: Troisième Année Secondaire (third year of the secondary school). 4 A.M: Quatrième Année Moyenne (fourth year of the middle school). AWL: The General Service List BNC HFWL: British National Corpus High Frequency Word List COBUILD: Collins Birmingham University International Language Database E.F.L: English as a Foreign Language. E.S.L: English as a Second Language. F.L: Foreign Language. GSL: General Service List L1: First language L2: Second language LIH: Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis UWL: The University Word List ii List of Tables Table 1: Middle school textbooks …………………………….………..….……… 224 Table 2: Secondary school textbooks ……………………..…….…..…………… 235 Table 3: Sample output from FREQUENCY …………………………………… 249 Table 4: Labelling System …………………………….…………..…………..…. 253 Table 5: Corpus compilation process …………………………….……....…….… 254 Table 6: Examples of types of words Excluded from the headword list …..…… 256 Table 7: Answering the research questions……………………………..………… 257 Table 8: The distribution of word families in the seven textbooks ………..……… 261 Table 9: Overall results: Middle school textbooks comparison …………...……. 263 Table 10: New lexical items in middle school textbooks, Books 2, 3, and 4. …. 265 Table 11: Lexical coverage in middle school textbooks.…………………………. 268 Table 12: Distribution of headwords in the secondary school textbooks ……….. 273 Table 13: Overall results of secondary school textbooks comparison …………. 275 Table 14: New lexical items in secondary school textbooks …………………… 277 Table 15: Lexical coverage in secondary school textbooks ……………………. 279 Table 16: Lexical coverage in all textbooks ............................................................ 281 Table 17: Rank order of textbooks by lexical coverage .......................................... 285 Table 18: Results yielded by RANGE ................................................................... 289 Table 19: Results from RANGE and Lextutor software ....................................... 293 iii List of Figures Figure Page Figure 1: File structure in Spotlight on English Book 1 ............................................ 227 Figure 2: File structure in Spotlight on English Book 2............................................ 231 Figure 3: File structure in Spotlight on English Book 3............................................. 233 Figure 4: File structure in At the Crossroads............................................................. 239 Figure 5: Number of word families and word types in the BNC high-frequency word lists ………………………………………………………………. 248 Figure 6: Snapshot of The Compleat Lexical Tutor ................................................. 250 Figure 7 Snapshot of the Lextutor