A Corpus-based Analysis of High School English Textbooks and English University Entrance Exams in Turkey

Abstract

This study aims to explore the missing link between English textbooks used in high schools (9th-12th grades) and English university entrance exams (2010-2019) in Turkey on lexical and syntactic complexity levels by using corpus linguistics tools: AntWordProfiler, TAALED, and the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA). Official textbooks and complementary materials obtained from the Ministry of National Education have been compared against the official university entrance exams from the past decade. The results show that: (i) differences in lexical sophistication level can be observed between the two corpora, the lexical sophistication level of the exam corpus was higher than that of the textbook corpus, (ii) there is a statistically significant difference between the two corpora in terms of lexical diversity, the exam corpus has a significantly higher level of lexical diversity than the textbook corpus, (iii) statistically significant differences also existed between the two corpora regarding the syntactic complexity indices. The syntactic complexity level of the exam corpus was higher than that of the textbook corpus. The findings suggest that Turkish high school students who have to learn English with the official textbooks throughout their high school years will have to tackle low-frequency and more sophisticated words at a higher level of syntactic complexity at the time of taking the nationwide exam. This, in return, creates a negative backwash effect, distorts their approach to L2, and raises other concerns about the misalignment between the official language education materials and nationwide exams.

The effects of different Chinese high school English textbooks on vocabulary acquisition

“…EFL textbooks have been studied in many countries, such as Japan (Sakata, 2019), Turkey (Gedik & Kolsal, 2022), Saudi Arabia (Alsaif & Milton, 2012), China (Yang & Coxhead, 2020) and other countries. The Swedish study also makes comparisons between different series of textbooks (Nordlund, 2016).…”

Input optimization: Verb-argument constructions in English textbooks in Türkiye

“…Although various studies analyze EFL materials in Türkiye (Arıkan, 2005;Demir & Yavuz, 2017), these studies mainly scrutinize the sociocultural aspects of the materials. While EFL textbooks in Türkiye were not analyzed from corpus-based approaches, there exist recent studies that point at the nature of input in them (Gedik & Kolsal, 2022). The EFL textbooks in Türkiye are distributed freely across the country and are required to be used in classrooms.…”

“…For instance, Gedik and Kolsal (2022) found that the textbooks severely lacked lexical diversity, leading to a practical implication of students being exposed to 10 new words on average every year throughout high school. Furthermore, they show that lexical sophistication levels are also quite low for low-frequency lexis, suggesting that low-frequency lexemes severely lack in terms of representation.…”

“…Considering textbooks in a classroom are one of the major ways of exposing students to the target language, it is possible to analyze the input readily available in them using a set of sophisticated software tools. While there are not many studies that have followed an input optimization analysis to textbooks in other contexts (however see Alsaif & Milton, 2012;Aziez & Aziez, 2018;Tang, 2009), to the researcher's knowledge there are no studies that analyze English textbooks in Türkiye from this perspective (see however Gedik and Kolsal (2022) and Gedik (2022) for a discussion on the lexicogrammatical diversity of the English textbooks in Türkiye). As such, the current study uses a readily available corpus of such textbooks in Türkiye to longitudinally trace the development of four VACs across high school textbooks.…”

A Comprehensive Framework for Comparing Textbooks: Insights from the Literature and Experts

“…However, since educational curriculums and textbooks differ from one country to another, it is difficult to reuse open textbooks in different contexts (and, by implication, countries) despite being open and free [28]. Therefore, analyzing and comparing textbooks across different countries could help to identify the similarities and differences of textbooks of those countries [29], which further contributes to designing universal open textbooks [30].…”