Curriculum Guidelines of 12-Year Basic Education-English stipulates students who complete English education in elementary schools should be able to use 300 words in oral English and at least 1,200 words in junior high school. The guidelines also list 1,200 basic and 2,000 commonly used reference words as the basis for writing and editing English textbooks. However, the vocabulary used in textbooks of different editions is not the same, and the textbooks used by students from elementary to junior high school are not all from the same publishing house, which leads to cross-version or cross-grade vocabulary learning gaps.
This research project will collect English textbooks used in elementary and junior high schools in Taiwan to build an English textbook corpus. By analyzing the number and frequency of the vocabulary of each version of the textbook, this study aims to explore the use of the vocabulary and compares it with the 1,200 and 2,000 vocabulary lists. Suggestion for reducing the gap in vocabulary learning and the revision of the 1,200 vocabulary list for junior high schools will be provided.
The policy response of this sub-project is as follows:
(a) to establish a corpus of English textbooks and to provide other related research projects for use;
(b) to reveal the current situation of vocabulary learning gaps in various textbooks used in Taiwan’s elementary and junior high schools, and propose short-term solutions;
(c) to provide suggestions for revision of the 1,200 vocabulary reference lists for junior high school curriculum guidelines.