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Article published In:
Register in L1 and L2 Language Development
Edited by Bethany Gray and Jesse Egbert
[Register Studies 3:2] 2021
► pp. 207–246

Register variation in school EFL textbooks

ORCID logo | Osnabrück University

This study applies additive Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) (Biber 1988) to explore the linguistic characteristics of ‘school English’ or ‘textbook English’. It seeks to find out how text registers commonly featured in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks differ from comparable registers found outside the EFL classroom. To this end, a Textbook English Corpus (TEC) of 43 coursebooks used in European schools is mobilised. The texts from six textbook register subcorpora and three target language corpora are mapped onto Biber’s (1998) ‘Involved vs. Informational’ dimension of General English. Register accounts for 63% of the variance in these dimension scores in the TEC. Additional factors such as textbook level, series and country of publication/use only play a marginal role in mediating textbook register variation. Textbook dialogues score considerably lower than the Spoken BNC2014, whereas Textbook Fiction scores closest to its corresponding reference Youth Fiction Corpus. Pedagogical and methodological implications are discussed.

Keywords: coursebooks, language teaching materials, multidimensional analysis (MDA), textbook English
Article outline
  • 1.Background
    • 1.1School English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks
    • 1.2Textbook English studies
    • 1.3A multivariate exploration of textbook English
    • 1.4Aims and research questions
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Corpus design and data collection
      • 2.1.1Textbook English corpus (TEC)
    • 2.2Target language reference corpora
      • 2.2.1Spoken BNC2014
      • 2.2.2Youth fiction corpus (YFC)
      • 2.2.3Informative texts for teens corpus (ITTC)
    • 2.3Comparative additive MDA
      • 2.3.1Tagging and counting linguistics features
      • 2.3.2Computing the mean dimension scores for the new registers
      • 2.3.3Computing dimension scores for additional reference corpora
      • 2.3.4Comparing dimension scores
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Variation across textbook English registers
    • 3.2The specificities of textbook English registers
      • 3.2.1Textbook conversation
      • 3.2.2Textbook informative texts
      • 3.2.3Textbook fiction
  • 4.Conclusion and recommendations
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20009.lef
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