|
Home page List of proceedings Info for readers Info for authors Info for editors Info for libraries Order form Shopping cart |
Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium edited by Nuria Sagarra and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio ISBN 1-57473-413-X library binding vi + 341 pages publication date: 2006 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Mark Davies and Timothy L. Face Vocabulary Coverage in Spanish Textbooks: How Representative Is It? 132-143 (complete pdf) The use of corpora has revolutionized materials development by providing textbook authors with reliable data on the frequency of words, phrases, and grammatical constructions in "real world" texts. Yet because there have not been large, representative, annotated corpora of Spanish until very recently, Spanish has lagged behind in this sense. This paper first discusses new corpora and frequency dictionaries that have recently been created for Spanish. It then compares this frequency data to the vocabulary from six first and second-year textbooks of Spanish, to see how well the textbook vocabulary matches up with the "real world" data from the corpora and frequency dictionaries. In order to do so, it looks at vocabulary coverage by part of speech, by textbook level, and by individual textbook. Finally, it examines what types of words are typically over- and under-represented in the textbooks, suggests reasons why this may be the case, and offers suggestions to materials developers on how to create more representative textbooks of Spanish. |