Speakers
Description
In the context of teaching English as a foreign language, textbooks serve as pivotal resources, particularly for reading materials, offering learners a primary source of lexical input. Additionally, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has approved many textbooks for teachers and learners to choose from. Thus, it becomes imperative to align the vocabulary level with students' language proficiency to ensure that reading texts effectively facilitate comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. This study aims to create a corpus of 130 reading texts from 8 eighth-grade English textbooks approved by the MOET to form a basic comparison of lexical profiles. The operational measures for comparison involved lexical coverage and CEFR levels, with 14-15 metrics calculated. Utilizing the BNC-COCA-25 available on https://www.lextutor.ca/ and the Text Inspector tool, the results revealed that students need to have different vocabulary sizes for each textbook to achieve 95% and 98% coverage of reading texts. Moreover, each textbook presents a different CEFR level, indicating suitability for varying groups of students. These findings emphasize the significance of educators in customizing reading materials to enhance learning effectiveness and overall comprehension.
