A Corpus-based Study of Vocabulary as Input in EFL Text-Book: A Case in an Indonesian Islamic College

Abstract

This study aims to identify the opportunities for vocabulary learning the EFL text-book entitled English Intensive Course for Islamic Studies provides for students. It specifically investigates the number of vocabulary the text-book under investigation presents, the distribution and frequency of the vocabulary, the top 100 words contained in the text-book, the distribution of word categories within 2,000 most frequent words, and whether the learners who use the text-book have sufficient exposure to the most frequent 2,000 English words. A corpus-based approach is used in this study. The results show that the text-book provides approximately 13,823 tokens which are listed in the first 1,000 words, making up to 79.3% of the running words. The total 2,548 types of vocabulary and the total 1,137 word families are found in the text-book. It provides vocabulary exposure to approximately 1,021 word families of the 2,000 most frequent words. It leaves around 979 word families to explore more. This situation shows that the text-book provides the students with insufficient exposure to the most frequent 2,000 English words.