Analyzing vocabulary activities in EFL textbooks*

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23925/2318-7115.2019v40i2a7

Keywords:

Vocabulary, Reading, Textbooks

Abstract

EFL textbooks were analyzed to investigate the relationship between the reading units and the vocabulary activities. From the three textbooks analyzed, only textbook one has a clear relationship between reading and vocabulary. A framework was also developed to investigate several aspects regarding the vocabulary activities. The first aspect regards how vocabulary was approached, and results have shown that vocabulary appears in different ways. The second aspect concerns glossaries/dictionary use, which was found that activities from all textbooks could be used as glossaries, while only textbooks two encourage dictionary use. The third aspect regards word-frequency, and only textbook one had more high-frequency words. The fourth aspect concerns the number of opportunities to find words in the input, and, again, only textbook one did so. The last aspect examined the depth of processing of the activities, and it was found that most of them promote a shallow level of processing.

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Author Biographies

Bruno De Azevedo, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Bruno de Azevedo is a PhD Candidate in Applied Linguistics at the English Graduate Program, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. He holds a Master’s Degree in English. His main field of interest is reading instruction and his current research is on bilingual reading in a multitasking environment. Email: bruno_de_azevedo@hotmail.com 

Lêda Maria Braga Tomitch, Universidade Federal de Santa

Lêda Maria Braga Tomitch is Professor at the Foreign Languages Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina. She holds a PhD degree in English. Her interests include working memory capacity and reading, reading and the brain; and reading instruction. Her current research is on bilingual reading in typical and atypical contexts. Email: leda@cce.ufsc.br

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Published

2019-12-10

How to Cite

De Azevedo, B., & Tomitch, L. M. B. (2019). Analyzing vocabulary activities in EFL textbooks*. The ESPecialist, 40(2). https://doi.org/10.23925/2318-7115.2019v40i2a7

Issue

Vol. 40 No. 2 (2019)

Section

Papers

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