Collocates of 'great' and 'good' in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Indonesian EFL textbooks

Abstract

Previous studies have proven some discrepancies between language presented in EFL textbooks and the real use of English. This fact contradicts the teaching materials’ aim, which is intended to equip the learners to be communicatively competent. This study then investigates the use of adjectives, limited to ‘great’ and ‘good’ in terms of the frequent and strong co-occurrences, i.e., collocations, in a general reference corpus of Standard English to be compared with those in Indonesian EFL textbooks. The data were collected from both the corpus and the textbooks, but the analyses in the textbooks were generated based on the Mutual Information (MI) score of the collocates. Based on the comparison, it is evident that there are some similarities between adjective use in the textbooks and the corpus in terms of verb collocates of the adjectives. The mismatches, however, are quite remarkable, especially in terms of the variability of adverb collocates and the absence of prominent noun collocates in the textbooks. Pedagogically speaking, these results should be taken into consideration in writing the textbooks to enhance the quality of the language content prepared for the learners in the EFL context.

The Infusion of Moral Values in A Commercial Publisher English Textbook

“…Based on the corpus analysis, there were some annotations that were in line with the corpus of moral values as found by Oktavianti & Sarage (2021) and Oktavianti & Prayogi (2020). However, this study categorized the annotated moral values into Nadhif"s (2017) framework.…”

“…Following Nadhif"s (2017) framework, the data are going to be calculated and compared to investigate the construction of moral values in the textbook examined. The proportion of moral values towards others, things and animal vocabularies were identified by calculating word lists as conducted by Oktavianti & Sarage (2021). While the proportion of moral value towards one"s self vocabularies were identified by calculating word lists as carried out by Oktavianti & Prayogi (2020).…”

Enhancing EFL Students’ COCA-Induced Collocational Usage of Coronavirus: A Corpus-Driven Approach

“…Given the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the target corpus of present study, several studies have affirmed its efficacy in enriching students' collocational use especially in writing [24][25][26][27][28][29]. Hu [25] explored the challenge that near-synonyms impose on the learnability and use of collocations for EFL students.…”

“…Oktavianti and Sarage [28] studied the frequent and strong collocates of the adjectives 'great' and 'good' in a corpus compiled from Indonesian EFL textbooks and compared them with those used in COCA. Based on the MI score of collocates, both corpora were similar regarding the verb + adjective structure (e.g.…”