Abstract

This paper describes the investigation and description of the vocabulary in two beginning level, Spanish as a second language textbooks that were both published in Mexico. This investigation makes use of a relatively new method of textbook analysis, which involves the measuring of real-world frequency of the vocabulary presented in a text. A frequency list of the most frequent 5,000 words in an extensive corpus of modern written and spoken Spanish was used to describe the words chosen by the textbooks? authors. The vocabulary in this paper is described in terms of overall coverage of frequent and non-frequent entries. In more specific terms, however, this study also investigates the under- and over-represented entries. These are words that are highly frequent according to the corpus and words that are presented in the textbook but are not in the frequency list, respectively. Because both of these textbooks were written with the second language learner in mind, this paper also describes how Mexican-specific vocabulary is treated by both textbooks.

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Table of content

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Review of Literature

Chapter 3. Methodology

Chapter 4. Results and Analysis

Chapter 5. Conclusions

References

Appendix A. Lemmas in the Top 500 that were not represented in each textbook

Appendix B. Table of Contents of Pido la palabra: Primer nivel (1998)

Appendix C. Methodological Bases of Pido la palabra: Primer nivel (1998)

Appendix D. Table of Contents of ¡Estoy listo!: Nivel 1 (2003)

Appendix E. Percentages of syntactic categories in the top 5,000 most frequent lemmas

Appendix F. Figure F1

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Hardy, J. A. 2007. Vocabulary Coverage in Textbooks for Learners of Spanish. Tesis Maestría. Lingüística Aplicada. Departamento de Lenguas, Escuela de Ciencias Sociales, Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de las Américas Puebla. Mayo. Derechos Reservados © 2007.