The purpose of this study is to analyze the authenticity of the vocabularies used in the 14 revised High School English textbooks in 2013, focusing on adjective synonyms, fast, quick, and rapid through textbook corpus and the Corpus of Comtemporary American English(COCA). With a approach to Data-Driven Learning(DDL) and corpus-based English language teaching /learning, this paper examines to see if there is apparent inconsistencies in various usages of the synonyms between authentic data and materials for the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language(EFL).
Corpus(plural corpora) is commonly defined as the digitalized collection of spoken or written registers, or a mix of both of a given language. This allows for very large amounts of text to be mased and analysed using specially designed software. Genuine data of a language electronically stored into a database can be easily retrieved to make calculations for a practical linguistic analysis such as pattern grammar. Of various corpora, 450-billion-word corpus, COCA, which provides opportunities to analyze recent and ongoing changes in the American English language is a well-known and appropriate example of this kind of corpus.
Within the corpus-based approach, we analyze the target words in terms of frequency of occurrence, noun collocations, semantic prosody, grammatical patterns(colligations), and light verb-related collocations by examining the instances of COCA and the Korean textbooks for English classes.
The results are as follows. First, in COCA, quick is the most frequent word (33,579, per million words: 72.32), followed by fast(14,769, per million words: 31.81) and rapid(11,814, per million words: 25.44), while in textbooks, the instances of quick and fast are 27, respectively, but rapid appeared for only four times in total.
Second, English native speakers make use of various noun collocations in using fast, quick and rapid, however according the finds, there are just few of the nouns collocating the adjectives used in the textbooks for Korean learners. In terms of semantic prosody of three lexical items with similar meanings, while there, in COCA adjective fast and quick collocated frequently with nouns which have neutral connotation, and rapid also combined well with positive and negative nouns. However, in textbooks, rapid did not used along with nouns with negative meaning.
Third, we investigated the frequency of two types of grammatical patterns such as ‘to be+adjective+to infinitive’ and ‘adjective+preposition’, the results shows that their use is pretty limited to the text materials in contrast with COCA data. Grammatical patterns could be more difficult to learn than lexical ones for the EFL learners like Korean (Benson et al. 1997). Accordingly, EFL learners also need to be taught these high frequent colligation in their class.
Lastly, this study analysed how fast, quick and rapid combined with light verbs and collocated nouns that are strongly attracted to one another in what may appear to be arbitrary ways. For instance, in a collocational type of ‘light verb+a+adjective+noun’(e.g., take a quick look), the most frequently used adjective is quick in native corpus. The order of frequency of light verb patterns concurred with quick is as follows, ''take a quick+noun(cases: 53.03%)'' has the most patterns of light verbs we found in COCA collocations, and ‘make a quick+noun’ is the second largest number (cases: 18.18%). On the contrary, in text, the type of ‘light verb+a+adjective+noun’ is nothing but five instances collectively.
In accordance with the research results, usages of target vocabularies used in the pedagogical corpus is compared with that of real data in native corpus. The results has uncovered many new facts about authentic and frequent language use of the target words used for this study. Consequently we can infer that the some usages of the target words in the textbooks does not correspond to their actual usages in COCA to some degree.
Based on the findings above, this study suggests that there is a need for a textbooks to be appropriately modified to teach EFL students authentic English language with actual usage and to better reflect the dynamism of the language features. Moreover, it is necessary to focus on vocabularies according to the language frequency on the basis of corpus data for teaching genuine usage in order to help EFL students acquire native-like accuracy and fluency through frequency-based vocabulary teaching/learning. Also, further studies should conduct more research on various vocabularies of the elementary, middle, and high school English textbooks.