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Vocabulary in textbooks for young learners

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DOI: 10.24834/educare.2015.1.1145

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Vocabulary in textbooks for young learners

Marie Nordlund

An extensive vocabulary is necessary for successful communication in a foreign

language. According to the Swedish National Agency for Education, the teach-
ing of English in Sweden is often based on one textbook and on that textbook
only. The purpose of this study is therefore to describe what vocabulary is pre-
sented in one teaching material aimed at school years 4–6 (age group 10–12
years) in Sweden. More precisely, the following questions have been consid-
ered: (i) what are the most frequent words in the textbooks? and (ii) to what
extent do words recur in the textbooks? To answer these questions, a corpus of
the texts in the three books was compiled. The analyses show that although the
texts appear to have been chosen to appeal to the age groups aimed for, there
does not seem to be any consciously considered rationale behind the choice of
what vocabulary to include, many words occur only once and the necessary
repetition of words is thus lacking.

Keywords: English, frequency, repetition, vocabulary acquisition, word fre-

quencies

Marie Nordlund, senior lecturer, Department of Arts, Communication and

Education, Luleå University of Technology
Marie.Nordlund@ltu.se

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Introduction
Knowledge of vocabulary is imperative to communication in a foreign lan-
guage. Research on vocabulary learning has demonstrated, among other
things, the importance of vocabulary in making oneself understood, the size
of vocabulary needed and how vocabulary is best taught and learned (see,
e.g., Milton, 2009; Nation, 1990, 2001, 2008; Read, 2000; Schmitt, 2000). In
many foreign-language classrooms, the textbook is often the main, and
sometimes the only, teaching material used; despite this centrality, few stud-
ies have focussed on the correlation between the structure of teaching mate-
rials and vocabulary content (see, however, Meara & Suárez García, 2010;
Rixon, 1999). In a study of seven international textbooks in English for be-
ginners, Rixon (1999) found that the books were lacking in several respects,
one of them being inadequate reuse of words. Recurrent meetings with
words enable the automatization of word knowledge and recognition (Tyler,
2012, p. 53) and the development of a sight vocabulary (Coady, 1997, p.
235; Laufer, 1997, p. 23)—the direct and unconscious decoding of the mean-
ing of words read is as important as learning to directly decode words heard.
Hence, vocabulary learning should be in focus in the beginners’ classroom
(Coady, 1997, p. 229). To build up a vocabulary in a new language is not an
easy task, and learners need all the help they can get—from teachers as well
as from the structure and content of the teaching material used. Since
Rixon’s (1999) results indicate that textbooks often conform badly to ad-
vances within our understanding of the role of vocabulary acquisition in
second language learning, they beg the question, Do other textbooks in Eng-
lish have the same flaws? In the Swedish context, studies have focussed on
the high school level (Ljung, 1990, 1991), but so far, no comprehensive
study has focussed on how vocabulary is presented in textbooks for young
learners. The results of a survey carried out by the Swedish National Agency
for Education on the use of teaching materials (Skolverket, 2006) indicate
that it is far from evident that the contents of textbooks used actually corre-
spond to the learning objectives set out in the national curriculum. There is
thus more than one reason to study this area further.

Learning vocabulary
The relation between the development of a sight vocabulary and the auto-
matic decoding of words may seem self-evident, but determining what con-
stitutes ‘knowing’ a word is not as straightforward. Nation (1990, p. 31), for
instance, lists eight different aspects of knowing a word:

• its meaning(s)
• its written form
• its spoken form

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• its grammatical behaviour

• its collocations
• its register
• its associations
• its frequency

Clearly, not all words in one’s vocabulary are ‘known’ to the same extent;
some are recognised and understood in context only (receptive vocabulary),
while others are readily available for productive use. However, there are also
degrees in between, as Melka (1997) puts it:

Word recognition is possible even when the word is stored incom-

pletely or when word production is still impossible. Similarly, even if
the word has not reached a totally productive stage, many of its fea-
tures may be productively known by the subject. (p. 88)

Furthermore, building up a vocabulary in a new language, Nation’s (1990)

list indicates, is not just a matter of adding new words to those already
known (i.e., acquiring breadth of vocabulary); it also requires expanding the
knowledge of words already acquired and stored in the mental lexicon (i.e.,
acquiring depth of vocabulary). This expansion includes, but is not restricted
to, further knowledge of collocations, nuances of meaning, synonyms and
antonyms and can be achieved when words are used and encountered in
many different contexts. Within cognitive linguistics the construction of the
mental lexicon is described as a network (Aitchison, 2012) where words are
joined together by more or less strong relations, which depend on the
learner’s previous experience of and encounters with the words. As
Schoonen and Verhallen (2008) explain, “learning new words is more than
the acquisition of isolated lexical units: new words are embedded in a lexical
network which means that all kinds of connections with related words have
to be established” (p. 213). Transferring new words from short-time working
memory to long-time memory is therefore facilitated if the information can
be “hooked” onto information that is already stored:

Vocabulary is best learned when the meaning of the word(s) is illus-

trated, for example by a picture, an action, or a real object. The chil-
dren should then meet and use the word(s) in relevant contexts, in or-
der to ‘fix’ them in their minds. This helps establish their relationship
to other words, so that a vocabulary network is built up. (Phillips,
1993, p. 68)

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In this vocabulary network, then, breadth is signalled by the number of

nodes present, whereas the number of links between different nodes corre-
sponds to depth.
Frequency—that is, how often learners meet new words and how often
words recur in different contexts—is central in this process. Ellis (2002) main-
tains that “the recognition and production of words is a function of their fre-
quency of occurrence in the language” and that “each time we process [a
word] there is a reduction in processing time” (p. 152). Even though most
researchers agree that learners need to meet new words several times before
they can be integrated into the mental lexicon, the minimum number of times
necessary vary, but ten times is a number that is mentioned more often than
others (Matsuoka, 2012, p. 158). A high number of words occurring only once
in a textbook must then be considered a waste of time: “If recycling is ne-
glected, many partially known words will be forgotten, wasting all the effort
already put into learning them” (Schmitt, 2000, p. 137). Findings from a study
of word frequencies in textbooks (Kachroo, 1962, as cited in Nation, 1990, p.
43) point in the same direction: the majority of the informants had no knowl-
edge of more than half of those words that occurred only once or twice in the
books, whereas words occurring at least seven times were understood by most
informants. Repetition is, thus, a necessary ingredient in successful vocabulary
learning. Results from a comprehensive American study on memory indicate
that a time interval of 1–4–10 (repetition one, four and ten days after the first
learning opportunity), for example, is optimal and results in better retrieval
than, for instance, 5–5–5 (Klingberg, 2011, p. 65; see also Nation, 2003, p.
14). Generally speaking, the more frequently a learner uses or is exposed to a
word, the easier it will be to remember and use appropriately. Ideally, words
should also appear in different contexts, as this promotes the formation of
networks and the development of vocabulary depth.

Core vocabulary
When children with English as their first language start school around the
age of five, they generally have a productive vocabulary of approximately
3,200 words (Biemiller, 2003, p. 327)—a vocabulary that grows with around
500 words each year (Nation & Waring, 1997, p. 7; Schmitt, 2000, p. 3).
Since a second language learner seldom has access to daily input of authen-
tic language, the same development of vocabulary cannot be expected. The
question is then what words to learn.
There have been attempts to define a core vocabulary for English. One is
Ogden’s Basic English, the development of which began in the 1930s. Basic
English contains 850 words and, it is claimed (Ogden, 1944, p. 10), is suffi-
cient for everyday conversations. The problem with Basic English is that it is
not as basic as its name would suggest. The words included are highly

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polysemous and estimations indicate that, added together, its 850 words
actually have 12,425 different meanings that the learner has to acquire
(Carter & McCarthy, 1988, p. 3).
A later attempt is West’s (1953) A general service list of English words
(GSL), which comprises 2,000 words. The list was compiled from corpus
data and contains information about the different meanings of the words as
well as how frequent these meanings are. Just as Basic English, the words in
the GSL are said to make participation in everyday conversations possible;1
additionally, they also enable the learner to understand approximately 80%
of a text on a general topic (Carter & McCarthy, 1988, p. 7). In more special-
ized texts, much of the semantic burden lies on low-frequency words. For a
learner to able to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words with the help of
context, that kind of text is more likely to require a coverage of 95–98%
(Laufer, 1997, p. 127; Nation & Waring, 1997, p. 10; Schmitt, 2008, p. 330),
which would call for a vocabulary containing the 3,000 most frequent words
(Nation & Waring, 1997, p. 11).
Within the European context, work on establishing lexical thresholds for
different usage levels is longstanding and has resulted in the development of
the Common European framework of reference for languages (CEFR; Coun-
cil of Europe, 2001). The original work preceding the framework (e.g., van
Ek & Trim, 1998a, b) contained word lists indicating a vocabulary of ap-
proximately 1,000 words for basic users (A2 level) and 2,000 words for in-
dependent users (B1 level). Primarily, beginning learners should acquire
highly frequent but neutral words since these can be used in more than one
context (Schmitt, 2000, p. 37). A realistic goal for basic language use could
thus be the 2,000–3,000 most frequent words (ibid., p. 84; see also Stæhr,
2008). An aspect worth mentioning in this context is that there is not much
discussion in the literature about when this goal should be achieved, even
though Cameron (2001, p. 75) maintains that acquiring 500 new words per
year is a reasonable goal for young language learners. From an educational
point of view, it is relevant to consider how much time learners have at their
disposal to acquire a vocabulary of this size since this will have implications
for the creation of national curricula and the planning of teaching in both a
short-term and a long-term perspective as well as for progression in the de-
sign of teaching materials. In the Swedish national curriculum for the com-
pulsory school (Skolverket, 2011), no vocabulary size is mentioned among
the goals to achieve, but “it is reasonable to expect that students should reach
at least the B1 level in English at the end of compulsory school [school year
9] in order to obtain a pass” (Skolverket, 2012, p. 28, my translation). In
theory, then, after 480 hours of English teaching (Skolverket, 2011), students

1
Read (2004, p. 150) is, however, of the opinion that a more realistic figure for everyday communication
is a vocabulary of 3,000 words.

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should have knowledge of the most frequent words in English. However, as

shown by Stæhr (2008) in his study of the vocabulary of Danish 15–16-year-
olds, this might not conform to reality.

Textbooks in language teaching

Views on whether or not textbooks should be used in the classroom vary, but
many student teachers in Sweden today have a bias against working with
textbooks and almost regard it as inappropriate (personal observations).
They consider textbook contents to be out of date and dialogues to be con-
trived; textbooks are static rather than dynamic, and they are not appealing to
learners. Student teachers are not the only ones to have these opinions, re-
searchers agree. In particular, it is the structure of dialogues and the lan-
guage used in them that have been criticised for being unnatural (Cameron,
2001, p. 69; Kirk & Carter, 2010, p. 37), but also more general criticism has
been voiced: “There is some concern … that ELT course books contradict
rather than reflect contemporary developments in applied linguistics” (Ma-
tsuoka & Hirsh, 2010, p. 59).
Despite the critique, teachers, and in particular new teachers without the
experience that comes from many years of teaching, often rely heavily on
textbooks in their planning and teaching (Skolverket, 2006; see also Matsu-
oka & Hirsh, 2010, p. 59). Quite often, it is the textbook—and, conse-
quently, the textbook writer(s)—that decides what should be taught in the
classroom and is seen as the authority as regards what counts as a well-
planned class (Abello-Contesse & López-Jiménez, 2010, p. 96) because
teachers do not have the time and do not always have the competence needed
to analyse teaching materials and evaluate their suitability (Council of
Europe, 2001, p. 141). Textbooks are products that “greatly influence the
learning/teaching process” (ibid.), and it is important that the methods used
in language teaching are those considered most effective (ibid., p. 142). A
conclusion to be drawn from this is that it is equally important that the struc-
ture and contents of textbooks are designed in accordance with research
within the field of second language acquisition. The question is whether this
is always the case.

The present study

The purpose of the present study is to describe what vocabulary is presented
in textbooks used in Swedish intermediate schools. The following questions
will be addressed:

• What words are most frequent in the textbooks?

• To what extent do words recur in the textbooks?

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Material
The material analysed comprises three textbooks aimed at school years 4–6
in Sweden (pupils aged 10–12 years) from the series Good Stuff, published
by Almqvist & Wiksell/Liber. Together with two other series, it is one of the
most commonly used textbooks in Sweden. The books analysed—Good Stuff
4 (school year 4), Good Stuff 5 (school year 5) and Good Stuff A 2 (school
year 6)—will henceforth be referred to as GS4, GS5 and GSA. The texts in
the books are arranged in thematic units (see Table 1). Both GS4 and GS5
contain eight units, each covering more than one theme (for example,
Sports/School/Friends) and containing a varied number of different texts. In
GSA, each of its thirteen units is devoted to one theme only (for instance,
Sports).

Table 1. Thematic units in GS4, GS5 and GSA.

Good Stuff 4 Good Stuff 5 Good Stuff A
Numbers / Home Home / City Animals
Colours / Family Shops / Clothes Sports
House / Time / Pets Nature / Crime Food
In the country / Hob-
Food / The table A folk tale
bies
Body / Clothes Friends / Fun Pirates
Hobbies / Weather School / Stories Fighters
Sports / School / Fri-
Film / Music Countries
ends
Fun / Holidays Australia Clothes
Magic
Explorers
Dragons
Horror
December

Analysis
To analyse and compare the vocabulary presented in the three books, a cor-
pus of all the texts was compiled. The corpus consists of three sub-corpora,
one for each book. The size of the corpus in number of tokens (running
words) and types (individual words) is shown in Table 2.

2
Good Stuff A is followed by Good Stuff B–D aimed at school years 7–9.

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Table 2. Number of tokens and types in the corpus.

Number of to-
Sub-corpus Number of types
kens
GS4 9,500 1,293
GS5 13,916 1,658
GSA 17,617 2,126
Total 41,033 3,186

To facilitate analyses and comparison, the corpus has been tagged with in-
formation about word class, number, tense, etc. Tagging has been conducted
according to the principles used for the construction of the British National
Corpus (BNC). To search the corpus the concordancing software tool
MonoConc Pro has been used.
MonoConc Pro counts singular and plural forms of nouns, comparative
and superlative forms of adjectives, and verb inflections as different types.
This has been adjusted manually in Table 2 above. In other words, in this
study, for example, cat-cats, old-older-oldest and ask-asks-asking-asked are
treated as one type each. An additional adjustment has also been made for
the category of nouns. According to the tag key used, names for days,
months, holidays and countries are tagged as proper nouns and, as such,
would not show in the results generated by the software program for a search
of nouns. In this study, they have been treated as common nouns and have
been added to the data analysed.
Even though the whole corpus has been tagged, the present study is lim-
ited to an analysis of the open word classes adjectives, nouns and verbs.
These constitute the three largest categories of content words as well as be-
ing the most important word classes. They also account for a major part of
the material analysed as a whole. The books vary slightly in this respect: in
GS4 the three word classes comprise 46% of the total number of tokens, and
in GS5 and GSA the corresponding figures are 44% and 45%, respectively.
Expressed in types, the dominance of these three word classes is even more
pronounced, with figures ranging between 72 and 78%. The data, after man-
ual adjustments, are presented in Table 3.

Table 3. Number of types per word class and % of total number of types per
book.
Word class GS4 GS5 GSA
Adjectives 155 / 12.0 219 / 13.2 288 / 13.5
Nouns 575 / 44.5 778 / 46.9 932 / 43.8
Verbs 201 / 15.5 292 / 17.6 372 / 17.5
Total 931 / 72.0 1,289 / 77.7 1,592 / 74.8

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Findings and discussion

Word frequencies
The most frequent words in each word class are presented in Tables 4–6
below. The cut-off point for high frequency differs between word classes
and is, to a certain extent, arbitrary. The decision is based on where it is pos-
sible to discern a clear difference in frequency between types—that is, where
there is a sharp decline in frequency and where remaining words are spread
out relatively evenly with tokens on every frequency level. A tendency for
all three books is that the lower the frequency, the more types. In other
words, there are proportionally more low- and mid-frequency word types
than high-frequency ones. This applies to all three word classes.

Table 4. Adjectives with a frequency of at least 20 tokens.

GS4 GS5 GSA
good (32) big (37) good (65)
little, red (28) good (32) big (58)
big (20) little (28) old (28)
old (26) small (25)
happy, new (23) bad (22)
The exact number of tokens is given in brackets. Words in the
same cell have the same number of tokens.

High-frequency adjectives account for approximately one-fifth of the total

number of adjective tokens in the books. As can be seen from Table 4,
there is little variation among the most common items. All the frequent
adjectives are words which can be used in many different contexts, and
they are also among the 1,000 most frequent words in larger general cor-
pora such as the BNC and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
The most pregnant difference is seen in GSA, where good and big stand out
with 65 and 58 tokens, respectively. The analysis also shows that other,
semantically related, adjectives exist in the data (e.g., big: great, large,
enormous) but not at all to the same extent. Both good and big have a wide
range of usages and do not generally affect the interpretation of the nouns
they modify either positively or negatively. Thus, it might prove difficult
(or be less appropriate) to substitute them for other adjectives which might
give more emphasis or add connotations to the utterance. However, since
good and big recur in similar constructions in all the books, their persistent
use does not add much to vocabulary depth. Therefore, in general, a more
focussed use of other adjectives, giving the learners access to more nu-

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ances and ways of expressing themselves, would be desirable for the de-
velopment of both breadth and depth of vocabulary.
Another difference between the books is the presence of colour terms in
GS4. Only red entered the top list, but added together, colours account for
almost one-fifth of the total number of adjective tokens. The corresponding
figures for colour terms in GS5 and GSA are merely four and seven per cent,
respectively. In English textbooks written for young learners in Sweden,
colour terms are generally of high frequency. A quick and by no means sci-
entific search on Google (5 April 2013) for the terms ‘young learners’ and
‘colours’ also resulted in more than 1.5 million hits, many of them contain-
ing exercises to use in the classroom. GS4 could, thus, be said to follow what
seems to be a set pattern: at an early stage, young learners should learn how
to describe the colour of an object.
If there is little variation among high-frequency adjectives, the opposite
holds for nouns (as shown in Table 5).
As is clear from Table 5, the number of nouns with a frequency of at least
15 tokens is quite similar in GS4 and GS5: 14 and 15 types, respectively.
There is a marked increase in GSA, however, with 40 different types. The
variation between the books as regards high-frequency nouns is consider-
able: only six types are common to all the books (in alphabetical order: dad,
day, friend, mum/mom, school and time).
A closer analysis reveals that the themes, and hence the texts, chosen for
inclusion in the books have a major impact on what words are highest in
frequency. Words like dad and mum/mom are a natural part of texts about
children and their families, but they are also frequent because they are ex-
plicitly named as participants in dialogues. The high number of tokens for
man (GS5 and GSA), boy (GSA) and assistant (GSA) can also be explained in
the same way. This will sometimes skew the vocabulary count. In the 100
million word corpus BNC, assistant has a total frequency of 27 tokens, al-
most the same as in the 41,000 word corpus compiled for the present study.
When the concordances for the GS4 words bed, doctor and monkey are ana-
lysed in more detail, it is revealed that most of the tokens stem from the song
Five little monkeys. If these tokens were not counted, none of the words
would reach the 15-token level. Indeed, monkeys would not have any tokens
at all. In similar ways, it is possible to explain the high frequency of other
nouns in GS4 as well as in GS5 and GSA.

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Table 5. Nouns with a frequency of at least 15 tokens.

GS4 GS5 GSA

dad (48) mum/mom (44) people (63)
mum/mom (38) people (43) man (57)
day (36) day (40) dragon (42)
dog (29) dad (38) day (41)
friend (25) man (32) food, snake (36)
bed, name (23) friend (30) friend (35)
time (21) time, wolf (26) mum (33)
doctor (20) honey (24) time (31)
monkey (19) film (19) witch (29)
Australia, hand, zoo
summer, week (18) dad, water, year (28)
(17)
school (16) life, school (15) animal (26)
fish (15) pirate, story (25)
woman (24)
assistant (23)
boy, home (22)
human (21)
clothes, thing (20)
cane toad, child,
school, world (19)
country, door, house,
name (18)
fire, narrator, soldier,
way (17)
hand, ship (16)
Christmas, head, night
(15)
The exact number of tokens is given in brackets. Words in the same cell
have the same number of tokens.

In GSA, many of the high-frequency nouns stand out and do not have an
equal position in general corpora. Many of them would not reach a fre-
quency of 15 tokens had it not been for the themes chosen. This is the case
for words such as dragon, snake, pirate, witch, cane toad, narrator and sol-
dier. In the material accessed for the study, it is not stated what rationale is
behind the choice of themes. The decidedly skewed results, favouring words
such as cane toad which have little use in common contexts, lead to the con-
clusion that vocabulary was not incorporated into the planning of the text-

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books. Sadly, this is not uncommon in language-learning textbooks. Nation

(1993) and, more recently, Meara and Suárez García (2010) and Burton
(2012) point out that the inclusion of vocabulary seems to be random and, to
a large extent, depends on the individual preferences of textbook writers.
Even though the themes chosen for the Good Stuff-series may be considered
appealing to learners in the ages aimed for and, consequently, favourable for
vocabulary learning, what is needed are textbooks which to a much larger
extent than now make use of the insights gained through corpus linguistic
studies as regards frequency and usefulness of words (Matsuoka, 2012).
Texts that are written exclusively for textbooks—most texts in Good Stuff
are produced by the textbook writers themselves—could easily be checked
against frequency lists to avoid unnecessary use of too many low-frequency
words.
Verbs in the three books generally have much higher frequencies than the
adjectives or nouns, and the cut-off point for high frequency has been set to
at least 40 tokens (as illustrated in Table 6). Only main verbs have been con-
sidered. Modal auxiliaries have been left out of the analysis, and so have be,
do and have in their auxiliary functions as well as instances of go used in the
future-time construction be going to.

Table 6. Main verbs with a frequency of at least 40 tokens.

GS4 GS5 GSA

be (438) be (609) be (811)
like (83) say (70) have (108)
go (68) get (64) go, say (70)
want (55) go (63) look (68)
come (54) see (60) know (58)
get (52) look (55) want (56)
come, think
say (47) have, know (50)
(55)
love (41) do (47) see (50)
have (40) want (46) take (48)
take (41) eat, get (45)
do (40)
The exact number of tokens is given within brackets.
Words in the same cell have the same number of tokens.

The number of verb types reaching the 40-token level is relatively similar
when the three books are compared: nine, eleven and fourteen types, respec-
tively. As can be clearly seen, be is the most frequent verb in all three books
and represents a large number of tokens: 21% in GS4, 20% in GS5 and 22%

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in GSA. Usages of be are mainly focused on descriptions (be a/an N and be

Adj) and presentations ( I am X, This is X), knowledge that must be consid-
ered relevant for young learners and is commonly included in beginners’
textbooks.
Many of the types presented in Table 6 are also common to all the books
with no more than four types exclusive for one book only: like and love in
GS4 and think and eat in GSA. Further, the number of tokens for many of the
verbs shared is similar regardless of the book. Be is an exception, but apart
from that, have is really the only verb falling out of the pattern with its more
than doubled frequency in GSA as compared to GS5. This increase has sev-
eral explanations: (i) The construction have to do something is more than
three times as common in GSA. (ii) Third person singular has increases
markedly in GSA. (iii) The past tense form had is more frequent in GSA. (iv)
The largest difference lies, however, in the increased use of the construction
have a/an N, which can be linked to the higher number of noun types in
GSA. The supply of objects or attributes that someone can own or be sub-
scribed is simply larger in GSA.
The table of contents in GS4 and GS5 specify what words and expres-
sions students are supposed to learn in each chapter, and suggestions for
vocabulary homework in the teacher’s books often consist of complete
phrases. Thus, the intentions behind Good Stuff seem to be directed towards
functional language, in line with objectives in the CEFR and within commu-
nicative language teaching, where the notion of what language users can do
with language is highlighted. More than in the other books, the content in
GS4 is related to the domains laid down in the CEFR with many dialogues in
which functional language is encountered, but as the series advances, so does
the amount of narrative text at the expense of functionality.

Recurrence of words
A higher frequency for a word means that learners are more exposed to it,
something which contributes to learning. For the exposure to have any ef-
fect, however, it should also occur over time. Learners must be given the
opportunity to meet and process the word on several separate occasions in
order to acquire a thorough knowledge of it (Nation, 1993; Webb, 2007),
with the first repetition relatively shortly after the first encounter and then
with prolonged intervals (Klingberg, 2011; Nation, 2003).
The high-frequency words discussed in the previous section constitute
only part of the total number of words in the books. Hence, there are many
words to which the learners are not exposed to the same degree. The cut-off
point for low frequency has been set to a maximum of four tokens because
although most researchers agree that at least ten encounters are needed for a
word to be learned (Matsuoka, 2012, p. 158), a minimum of five encounters

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is sometimes mentioned (Cameron, 2001, p. 84). Anything below that num-

ber must definitely be regarded as low frequency. The results are presented
in Figures 1–3 below.

50
40
30 GS4
20 GS5
GSA
10
0
1 time2 times3 times4 times > 4
times

Figure 1. Frequency of adjective types (% of the total).

As shown in Figure 1, close to 45% of the adjectives in all three textbooks

occur only once in the texts. When all the low-frequency adjectives are com-
bined, they comprise between 77% and 81% of the total number of adjective
types.
The pattern displayed by adjectives is the same also for nouns, as seen in
Figure 2.

50
40
30 GS4
20 GS5
GSA
10
0
1 time 2 3 4 >4
times times times times

Figure 2. Frequency of noun types (% of the total).

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The distribution of one-time nouns differs slightly between the books, with a
range of 46%–50%. In GS4 and GS5, low-frequency nouns account for ap-
proximately 83% of the total number of noun types; the corresponding figure
in GSA is about 75%.
Even though the verbs conform to the pattern set by adjectives and nouns,
the low-frequency figures are generally lower. This is illustrated in Figure 3.
About 70% of all verb types in the three books have a frequency of maxi-
mum four tokens.

50

40

30 GS
4
20

10

0
1 time 2 times 3 times 4 times> 4 times

Figure 3. Frequency of verb types (% of the total).

However, the figures presented in Figures 1–3 above are somewhat mislead-
ing. Many of the words with a frequency of two, three or four tokens—and
this applies to all three word classes—occur in the same text or song. Conse-
quently, they have no exposure over time, which makes the learning oppor-
tunities provided by the books even more infrequent. Modifying the results
accordingly yields new figures for one-time words: on average, 54% of ad-
jectives, 59% of nouns and 47% of verbs occur only once.
When the three books are compared to see whether vocabulary is reused
over the series as a whole, the result is similarly discouraging (as shown in
Table 7).

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Table 7. Words common to the three books in %.

Occurrence in Occurrence in Occurrence in

Word class
one book two books three books
Adjectives 62.2 19.5 18.3
Nouns 64.9 19.8 15.3
Verbs 51.7 20.2 28.0
Total mean 59.6 19.8 20.5

An analysis of the words occurring in two books (one-fifth of the total) re-
veals that the combination GS5+GSA is the most common one. It is also
shown that GS4 has more adjectives and nouns in common with GSA than
with GS5. Whether this is pure coincidence or a conscious form of repetition
on the part of the authors—that is, that words are introduced in school year 4
in order to be reinforced in school year 6—cannot be concluded from the
material at hand. An additional 20% of the words occur in all the three
books, and many of these are also low-frequency words: 27% of common
adjectives, 30% of the nouns and 22% of the shared verbs. With as much as
60% of the words occurring in only one book, the writers seem to have fa-
voured (consciously or not) to opt for vocabulary breadth rather than depth.
However, considering the high number of one-time words, the likelihood of
learners achieving either breadth or depth must be questioned.
Since researchers on vocabulary acquisition have emphasised the impor-
tance of frequency and repetition more than once (Ellis, 2002; Nation, 1990;
Schmitt, 2000), it is alarming to see how many of the words in the data ana-
lysed are of such low frequency. Without proper reuse, efforts spent on
learning new vocabulary will be wasted. Unfortunately, the results of the
present study are not unique. Nation (1990) reports similar figures: “In some
courses, half of the different words occur only once and most of the words
occur less than five times” (p. 44; cf. Matsuoka & Hirsh, 2010, p. 65). Of
course, many of the words can be seen as ‘fillers’, words which only func-
tion as a background, to fill out the text and make it more interesting to read.
As such, they can be seen as less important for classroom treatment. Yet,
many of the low-frequency words are listed in the text glossaries, which, at
least in Sweden, quite often means that they will be part of the vocabulary
homework assigned to learners. Admittedly, this means that learners have to
practice the low-frequency words, which should make them easier to learn
and remember. On the other hand, despite this effort, they are unlikely to
reach the level of exposure needed, thus wasting the time spent on learning
them (Schmitt, 2000, p. 137). In practice, it would of course be impossible to
reuse every word in a textbook to the degree necessary to achieve long-term
retention. Moreover, students are not left on their own with the textbook as

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the only source of language input. Vocabulary is certainly repeated in differ-

ent classroom activities initiated by the teacher, and it is also possible that
words are reused in exercises in the workbooks. This remains to be investi-
gated for the Good Stuff-series, but it is very likely that textbook and work-
book chapters mirror each other as regards vocabulary focus. What is more,
many students develop their vocabulary through spare time activities per-
formed in English, such as on-line computer games (Sundqvist, 2009), even
though it might not be the same vocabulary presented in the textbooks. All
things considered, however, it could be discussed whether the number of
low-frequency words in the books analysed is not unnecessarily high and
actually works more like a distractor, making learning more difficult.

Conclusion
There are many teachers in Sweden who, for different reasons, follow the
textbook rigidly and plan all of their teaching in accordance with its structure
and content (Skolverket, 2006). In the teaching material analysed here,
aimed for young learners of English, variation in vocabulary is considerable.
Many low-frequency words means that learners are not sufficiently exposed
to new vocabulary, which in turn is not beneficial for learning, thereby mak-
ing it more difficult for learners to reach the objectives set in the national
curriculum and in the course plans. If such teaching materials are used in the
classroom, teachers will need to go outside the textbook in order to provide
learners with opportunities to engage with new vocabulary. In Swedish
schools today, there are many excellent teachers who enable their pupils to
develop their linguistic knowledge, but their less skilled colleagues need
more support. The importance of having adequate teaching materials, whose
structure and content are based on results from research within the field of
second language acquisition, cannot be emphasised enough.

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