How Many Words Do Teacher Students Need to Know to Successfully Read EFL Textbooks?

Author:

Furqanul Aziez

Bio:

Furqanul Aziez is a lecturer at Muhammadiyah University of Purwokerto, Indonesia. He has been teaching for the university for twenty one years. He mostly teaches on BA and MA courses in Lexical Study, Language Testing, and Innovations in Education. His main research interests include vocabulary, TEFL, and language testing.

Abstract

This study explores how many words teacher students need to know to easily read and understand EFL textbooks. A number of proportionally selected texts from EFL textbooks currently in use in Indonesian teacher training colleges are used to create a corpus as the basis of analysis. The corpus will be compared to the top 2,000 high-frequency words from the British National Corpus, Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List containing 570 interdisciplinary academic words, and the British National Corpus 1^st – 20^th 1000 high frequency word families. The results will show us how many words do the students need to know to attain the 95% coverage, how many more words they need to know beyond the top 2,000 most frequent words, and how many academic words do they need to know to successfully read EFL textbooks.

Keywords: EFL textbooks, academic words, BNC, 2,000 high frequency words, text

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