Engelskan i skolan : en undersökning av vokabulär i gymnasieskolans textböcker i engelska

This essay reviews vocabulary samples from three different textbooks, which are readers for the basic course in English at an upper secondary school in Sweden. The aim of the study is to determine whether the word samples from the readers’ word lists consist mostly of high- or low frequency words and if the words denote any particular semantic fields. Moreover, the possible use of word frequencies in second language acquisition is also examined. The method used in ascertaining the quality of the words is comparing the word samples to the BNC (the British National Corpus) and analysing how frequently they occur in written and spoken modern English. The results are based on the findings from the analysis made in this study and also compared to current research in the fields of linguistics and language acquisition. The results exhibit both overrepresentation- and absence of words in particular semantic fields. For instance, words from the semantic field concerning ‘food and cooking’ were found to be somewhat predominant. The findings also include support for the use of word frequencies in language acquisition, especially in terms of how words are translated from English into Swedish in the textbooks’ wordlists. The only Swedish synonym given was in some cases item of the least frequent usage in modern English, according to the BNC.