Vocabulary analysis in textbooks for teaching English in grades 4 and 5 of primary school

This master's degree thesis concentrates on analysis of vocabulary of six course books that were most commonly used to teach English in fourth and fifth grade in Slovenia in the 2019/20 school year. The second educational period sees the course books become one of the main means of teaching EFL (English foreign language) because they extensively determine the teaching contents that the students learn in that school year. The vocabulary in the course books is one of the main factors that contribute to successful learning of EFL and as such has to be intentionally developed. The most common words in course books and their overlap were established by analysing the course book vocabulary with AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2014). Vocabulary in textbooks was also classified regarding to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (eng.: CEFR, slo.: SEJO) and further analysed to determine the level (A1–C2) of it. The extent to which the vocabulary matches the 2.000 most common English words from the NGSL (New General Service List) and GSL (General Service List) lists was also analysed. The creators of NGSL wordlist are Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips. They started making the list in 2013 and finished and published it in 2017 (Brown, 2019). The list is based on 1953 formed GSL wordlist that was created by Michael West (West, 1953). We reached the conclusion that the vocabulary in the coursebooks has a greater overlap with the GSL than the NGSL list. Furthermore, the analysis of overlap among target vocabulary of all six course books was performed. We concluded that there is fairly small percentage of words from the target vocabulary that appear in all of the coursebooks. When only the course books that are used to teach EFL in specific grades were compared to each other, the percentage of overlap was a bit higher. The CEFR level analysis showed that most of the words in course books reach the A1 level and that the target vocabulary repeats with high enough frequency. The hypothesis that we set at the beginning was that the target vocabulary should repeat at least five times. Lastly, we performed the analysis of overlap between discussed chapters in course books and syllabus and the analysis of different parts of speech in target vocabulary. This master's degree thesis will affect the didactics of teaching English language in the second educational cycle, more accurately the development of course book vocabulary in fourth and fifth grade of elementary school. This analysis will help the teachers plan their teaching of English language in schools and the learning material designers in creating course books for the second cycle of elementary school. The thesis offers the insight into analysis of target vocabulary throughout course books