A lexical frequency analysis in English teaching materials of the e-Tec Idiomas Program
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26512/rhla.v25i1.59499Keywords:
Lexical frequency, Teaching materials, English language, e-Tec Idiomas, English language teachingAbstract
Recent research indicates that high-frequency words should be prioritized in foreign language vocabulary learning. However, lexical frequencies in textbooks, the main resource for learners, do not always match those observed in large corpora (Nation, 2011; Sakata, 2019). This study analyzes the frequency of verbs, nouns, and adjectives in the English Module I booklets of the e-Tec Idiomas program, compared to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA Corpus). The project is relevant to language teaching because, by examining a free educational material used in public institutions, it can propose improvements that support learning by aligning lexical frequency in the material with actual language use. The theoretical framework is based on Nation (2006; 2011), Criado and Sánchez (2012), and Norberg and Nordlund (2018). The methodology involved manual word collection and analysis of the correspondence between the material and the reference corpus. Results show that 85.59% of verbs belong to the 1,000 most frequent English lemmas, while nouns and adjectives reach 45.66% and 45.44%, respectively. The type/token ratio of 0.246 is suitable for basic-level material. Finally, less frequent words fulfill thematic and grammatical functions, meeting Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001) A1 level objectives.
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