# "I'm putting some salt in my sandwich." The use of the progressive in EFL textbook conversation

Elen Le Foll

► To cite this version:

Elen Le Foll. "I'm putting some salt in my sandwich." The use of the progressive in EFL textbook conversation. Broadening the spectrum of corpus linguistics: New approaches to variability and change, 105, John Benjamins, pp.92-131, 2022, Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 978-90-272-1266-5. 10.1075/scl.105.04lef. hal-04070482

HAL Id: hal-04070482

https://hal.science/hal-04070482

Submitted on 15 Apr 2023

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a paper published as:

Le Foll, Elen (2022). “I’m putting some salt in my sandwich.”: The use of the progressive in EFL textbook conversation. In Flach, S. & M. Hilpert (Eds.) *Broadening the spectrum of corpus linguistics: New approaches to variability and change*. pp. 92–131 Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.105.04lef.

# “I’m putting some salt in my sandwich.”

## The use of the progressive in EFL textbook conversation

Elen Le Foll, Osnabrück University

### Abstract

Previous studies have claimed that the progressive is frequently over- and misrepresented in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks (e.g., Römer 2005). This paper compares the representation of progressives in the dialogues of nine series of secondary school EFL textbooks (43 volumes) to the Spoken BNC2014. The frequencies, morphosyntactic and functional aspects of progressive constructions, such as contraction, negation, framing and time reference, are investigated. Collostructional analysis is used to explore the lexical associations of the progressive. A number of idiosyncratic uses of the progressive in textbook conversation are highlighted and pedagogical implications discussed. In particular, key conversational discourse-structuring phrasemes in the progressive are found to be critically underrepresented.

**Keywords:** textbook language, coursebooks, progressive aspect, textbook corpus, English as a Foreign Language (EFL), instructed second language acquisition, Spoken BNC2014, collostructional analysis, distinctive collexeme analysis, materials design

## 1 Background and aims

### 1.1 Introduction

In most non-English-speaking countries, the progressive is introduced in the first year of secondary school EFL<fnref n="1" /> instruction. Nonetheless, the progressive vs. non-progressive alternation remains a stumbling block for many learners of English, even at higher levels of proficiency (e.g., Hahn, Reich & Schmied 2000; Rautionaho, Deshors & Meriläinen 2018; Westergren Axelsson & Hahn 2001; Wulff & Römer 2009). For many EFL learners, the progressive is tricky in that it often has no direct equivalent construction in their L1 (Römer 2005: 2). To complicate matters further, it fulfils a diverse range of functions (Mair 2012; Binnick 2020) and studies have shown that these have undergone considerable changes over the past decades (e.g., Mair & Hundt 1995; Smith 2005; Smitterberg 2005). Whilst progressive constructions have been shown to be comparatively more frequent in spoken than in written English, corpus-informed grammars report that progressives are, in fact, rare across all varieties and registers, accounting for just three to

<footnote n="1">¹ EFL = English as a Foreign Language</footnote>

<footnote>ESL = English as a Second Language</footnote>

<footnote>ENL = English as a Native (or first) Language</footnote>

<footnote>L1 = First or native language</footnote>

<footnote>L2 = Second (or more) language</footnote>
ten percent of all verb phrases (Biber et al. 1999: 461–475; Leech, Rayson & Wilson 2001: 124–125; and Rautionaho 2014: 62–64 for a recent overview of studies on the evolution of the frequency of the progressive). At the same time, the use of the progressive in English appears to generally be on the rise in English (e.g., Hundt 2004; Mair & Hundt 1995; Smith 2005; Smith & Rayson 2007).

The progressive aspect has repeatedly been shown to be frequently over- and misused by EFL learners, especially those acquiring English in instructional settings. For instance, learner corpus studies have concluded that L1 Finnish, Swedish and German learners generally overuse the progressive as compared to ENL speakers (Virtanen 1997; Hundt & Vogel 2011; Westergren Axelsson & Hahn 2001; Römer 2005). More recent, fine-grained studies have revealed how EFL learners’ use of the progressive differs from ESL and ENL use in terms of frequency, range of semantic functions, choice of verb lemmas and genre-awareness, among other aspects (e.g., Fuchs & Werner 2018; Meriläinen 2018; Rautionaho & Deshors 2018; for comprehensive overviews of earlier studies cf. Römer 2005: chap. 3; Rautionaho 2014: chaps. 1–2).

Hundt & Vogel (2011) concluded that both language contact and exo-normative influences are likely to contribute to the attested differences in progressive usage in ENL, ESL and EFL varieties. They suggest that instructed EFL learners are foremost confronted with the “grammaticality issues and semantic restrictions of the progressive, making them more likely to overuse the prototype of the construction and less likely to ‘stretch’ the progressive to new contexts, such as combinations with certain stative verbs or new aspectual uses” (Hundt & Vogel 2011: 160).

The present study thus explores how progressives are presented in the most important source of language input that EFL learners are exposed to in secondary school instructional settings: their textbooks. To this end, the progressives featured in EFL textbook dialogues are compared to how the progressive is used in a corpus of contemporary spoken British English (henceforth: BrE) with the aim of examining whether textbooks genuinely reflect current progressive usage in real-life conversation. In other words, this study seeks to find out whether EFL learners’ well documented over- and misuse of progressive constructions may, at least partially, be materials-induced.

## 1.2 *The progressive in EFL textbooks*

Compared to the many studies on English learners’ use of the progressive, English language teaching materials have much more rarely been the subject of investigation. Whilst a range of lexico-grammatical features have been analysed in EFL/ESL textbooks and grammars (for an overview of “Textbook English” research from 1990 to 2009, see Meunier & Gouverneur 2009; for a literature review of studies published by 2019, see Le Foll forthcoming), thus far, very few have focused on the progressive. Bland (1988) and Belli (2017) examined the treatment of stative verbs in the progressive in ESL/EFL pedagogical materials and concluded that it did not match authentic usage, whilst Biber & Reppen (2002: 203) reported that EFL/ESL conversation textbooks overuse the progressive in their representations of spontaneous spoken language. However, to date, only Römer (2005) provides a comprehensive, corpus-based analysis of the progressive in EFL textbooks.

Römer (2005) examined the lexico-grammatical usage patterns of the progressive in a corpus of dialogues from EFL textbooks used in secondary schools in Germany. She compared those to a reference corpus of spoken BrE consisting of the spoken component
of the British National Corpus (BNC 1994) and the Bank of England. Key findings
include that, among the progressive verbs encountered in textbook dialogues, negated
progressives and contracted forms of the auxiliary BE are underrepresented as compared to
her corpus of spoken BrE, whilst question forms are overrepresented. An overuse of he
and she in subject positions of progressives and an underuse of I, it, we and they are
reported, as well as a distinct underuse of progressives conveying repeated actions.
Although she did not directly investigate which verb lemmas are frequently featured in the
progressive, Römer (2005) subdivided the analysis of specific morphosyntactic and
functional features according to a number of individual high-frequency verbs. Thus, as
compared to natural BrE conversation, present progressive forms with ASK, GO, PLAY and
STAY are found to be overrepresented in textbook dialogues, but these same lemmas are
seemingly underrepresented in the past progressive and present perfect progressive forms
as compared to the same reference corpus.

Although by far the most comprehensive study on progressives in EFL textbooks to date, it is worth noting that Römer’s (2005) study is nevertheless based on a relatively small corpus of pedagogical dialogues stemming from just two series of textbooks (12 coursebooks) used in German secondary schools. Effect sizes or confidence intervals are not reported for the many quantitative differences observed between textbook dialogues and natural conversation. Moreover, the analyses do not enable us to tease out which parameter(s) contributed to any one reported difference in frequency of use (e.g., polarity or verb lemma, tense or time reference). Crucially, whilst the frequencies and distributions of progressive forms and functions in Römer’s (2005) textbook dialogue corpus are frequently reported separately for the two textbook series, no attempt is made to distinguish how representations of the progressive in school EFL textbooks may change as the target readers’ language proficiency increases.

1.3 *Aims and research questions*

The present study aims to investigate how the progressive construction is portrayed in the dialogues of textbooks used at secondary school level in France, Germany and Spain, as compared to a corpus of contemporary BrE conversation (the Spoken BNC2014, see 2.1). Focusing on one register is crucial as the progressive construction has been shown to be highly susceptible to genre effects (e.g., Smith 2005; Rautionaho & Deshors 2018). Conversation was chosen as lower secondary school foreign language syllabi place a strong emphasis on real-life spoken communication. The choice of conversation also allows for a comparison of the use of the progressive in EFL textbooks currently in use in secondary schools in France, Germany and Spain to that of the German textbooks featured in Römer’s (2005) corpus, which were published a decade prior.

Since Römer’s study did not attempt to assess the frequency of progressives, there is, to
the best of the author’s knowledge, currently no empirical data to back or refute the claim
made by Biber & Reppen (2002: 203) that progressives are overrepresented in textbook
conversation (see 1.1). Thus, in addition to variables investigated in Römer (2005)
pertaining to the semantic functions and morphosyntactic contexts of progressives (see
2.2), the present study will also compare the overall frequency of progressive verbs in
textbook and natural conversation. Moreover, all comparisons will be made at both the
whole-textbook corpus level and separately for each textbook proficiency level (see 2.1).

In her concluding chapter on the pedagogical implications of her research, Römer (2005: 285) advocates for a shift towards a more lexical grammar of the progressive. This study will therefore additionally apply a collostructional approach to investigating the lexical associations of the progressive in textbook conversation. This will be achieved by
comparing the results of two Distinctive Collexeme Analyses (DCAs) of the lemmas
associated with both progressive and non-progressive constructions in textbook dialogues
and real-life conversation. Although there have been successful multifactorial approaches
to the study of progressives in different genres and ENL, ESL and EFL varieties (e.g., van
Rooy 2006; Fuchs & Gut 2015; Deshors 2017; Rautionaho & Deshors 2018; Rautionaho,
Deshors & Meriläinen 2018), so far, such models have not included verb lemma as an
independent variable.<fnref n="2" /> Excluding the variable lemma from such an analysis, however, is
potentially problematic both from a theoretical, usage-based approach, and a pedagogical
perspective. Indeed, the aspect hypothesis, which is in turn motivated by the distributional
bias hypothesis, postulates that:

First and second language learners will initially be influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs or predicates in the acquisition of tense and aspect markers associated with or affixed to these verbs (Andersen & Shirai 1994: 133).

In line with the predictions of the aspect hypothesis, Bardovi-Harlig (2012) advances that EFL learners first acquire the progressive aspect in the context of activity verbs and accomplishment. They later on extend the construction to repetitive (iterative and habitual) actions, before beginning to use it in futurate and, finally, stative functions. Supporting the aspect hypothesis, Rautionaho & Deshors (2018) report that, in their final regression model of progressive use by ENL, ESL and EFL speakers, only the semantic domain variable does not contribute to any higher-level interactions. They thus conclude that “regardless of varieties, written genres, tense, Aktionsart [accomplishment, achievement, process, or stative], voice, etc., the semantics of a given lexical verb systematically influences writers constructional choices” (Rautionaho & Deshors 2018: 238). Since lemma and semantic category are usually highly correlated, we might speculate that, if it were feasible to include them in such a model, individual verb lemmas may play an even more important role than semantic domain in mapping the use of the progressive. In the context of this pedagogically-motivated study, it therefore seems imperative to also consider which specific verb lemmas are more strongly associated to the progressive as opposed to the non-progressive in EFL textbooks and naturalistic conversation.

Against this background, the following five research questions were formulated:

1. Is the progressive overrepresented in textbook conversation as compared to a corpus of naturally-occurring BrE conversation?

2. What are the morphosyntactic contexts in which EFL learners encounter progressives in textbook dialogues? Are these contexts representative of those found in conversational BrE recorded in natural settings?

3. Which functions do progressives in textbook conversation typically fulfil? Are these representative of the most common functions observed in the Spoken BNC2014?

4. Have the progressives featured in textbook dialogues become more representative of those typical of BrE conversation than was the case at the time of Römer's (2005) study?

5. Which lexical verbs and semantic domains are significantly associated with or repelled by the progressive in textbook conversation? How does this compare to the Spoken BNC2014?

<footnote n="2">² Rautionaho & Deshors (2018: 236) report that they attempted to include lemma as a random effect variable but that the model did not converge.</footnote>
In analysing and evaluating the results, the discussion section will seek to find out whether
any of the differences noted in the use of progressives in textbook vs. naturalistic BrE
conversation may be pedagogically well-founded and/or whether any of the observed
discrepancies might deprive EFL learners of valuable exposure to particularly frequent
and salient forms and functions of the progressive.

## 2 Methodology

This section first presents the corpus data analysed in the context of this study (2.1), before turning to how the corpora were queried, the query results automatically pre-processed, and subsequently manually annotated for a number of morphosyntactic and functional variables (2.2). Sections 2.3 and 2.4 outline the statistical methods used to compare frequencies across the two corpora. The final section (2.5) briefly explains the procedure followed to conduct the collostructional analysis of the lexical verbs attracted to or repelled by the progressive in textbook and natural conversation.

### 2.1 Corpus data

The textbook data explored in this paper is a subcorpus of the Textbook English Corpus (TEC) which was compiled as part of a larger research project on ‘Textbook English’ (Le Foll to appear; forthcoming). The TEC consists of 43 EFL textbooks used in secondary schools in France, Germany and Spain and totals just over two million words. It consists of nine best-selling textbook series from eight major publishers. Each series corresponds to the first four or five years of English instruction at secondary school level (see Appendix: Table 14 for details). The 43 textbooks were converted to XML format and manually annotated for six textbook registers (conversation, informative texts, personal communication, instructional, song & rhyme, and contextless words/sentences, e.g., exercises) and automatically lemmatised tagged for part-of-speech using the Sketch Engine’s (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) default options (English TreeTagger v. 3.3).

This paper explores the conversation subcorpus (henceforth, Textbook Conversation Corpus, TCC) of the TEC. The TCC brings together all the printed dialogues, speech bubbles, as well as the scripts and transcripts of the video and audio conversation material from the 43 textbook volumes of the TEC. With some 420,000 words, the TCC is relatively large for such a specialised corpus. By way of comparison, Römer’s (2005; 2006) textbook dialogue corpus (GEFL TC) totalled 108,000 words.

The TCC is compared to the Spoken BNC2014, an 11.4-million-word corpus of orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers in the UK (Love et al. 2017) in a custom version uploaded onto Sketch Engine (Le Foll forthcoming). Basing comparisons on a reference corpus of BrE may be considered a limitation, especially since a number of studies have reported significant differences in progressive usage between various ENL varieties (cf. Hundt & Vogel 2011; Deshors 2017; Rautionaho, Deshors & Meriläinen 2018). However, although no longer explicitly mentioned in the national curricula, school EFL instruction in Europe remains largely oriented towards (Southern) BrE norms (Preisler 2002: 239; cf. Bieswanger 2012; Gilquin 2018; Syrbe & Rose 2018) and, in practice, the textbooks featured in the TEC overwhelmingly focus on the U.K., both in terms of language use and cultural contextualisation.
## 2.2 Data extraction and annotation

The aim was to retrieve all instances of progressives from the TCC and to subsequently extract, at random, a comparable number of progressives from the Spoken BNC2014 for comparison (see 2.5). Sketch Engine's advanced search option and the following CQL (Corpus Query Language) query were used to this effect:

(1) [tag="VB.*"][tag!= "SENT"]{0,3}[tag="V.G" & word!= "gonna"]

The query allows for a maximum of three intervening tokens (except end-of-sentence punctuation [SENT]) between the auxiliary BE [VB.*] and the *V-ing* form [V.G], e.g., a negation and/or other intervening adverbs, or a nominal phrase as a subject in question forms. The form *gonna*, which is tagged as a *V-ing* form by the Sketch Engine, was explicitly excluded from the query because it is mostly associated with *going to* + *Vinfinitive* constructions expressing future actions and events, which were excluded from the present investigation.

Next, false positives, i.e. non-progressives that were unintentionally retrieved by the corpus query (1), were filtered out. This included nouns and adjectives ending in *-ing* and erroneously tagged as present participles, *BE going to* + *Vinfinitive* constructions, non-finite verb phrases (e.g., *she continued reading*) and elided constructions (see Smitterberg 2005; Rautionaho 2014 for similar procedures).

Finally, the remaining concordance lines were annotated for a range of morphosyntactic and functional features chosen on the basis of previous corpus linguistics studies on the progressive aspect (in particular, Römer 2005; Rautionaho 2014; and Deshors 2017). To this end, regular expressions and the lemmatising function of the R package {textstem} (Rinker 2018) were used to annotate easily operationalisable features: verb lemma, contraction, negation and tense form. Then, question form, voice, time reference and the functional features that emerged from Römer's corpus-driven work on the progressive in spoken BrE were manually coded (Römer 2006: Appendix). Over the course of the first annotation cycle, a few minor changes to Römer's categorisation were deemed necessary: the functional category 'habits' was merged with the category 'repeatedness' due to large overlaps, and the categories 'emphasis/attitude' and 'shock/disbelief' were merged into one broader category due to disambiguation issues (see Table 1 for the final annotation scheme).

Half the concordance lines were annotated by the present author and the other half by a research assistant.<fnref n="3" /> The interrater agreement on two double-blind annotated random samples of 100 progressives from each corpus across nine (partially) manually annotated variables was satisfactorily high (96.22%). Only the 'continuous/non-continuous' variable proved particularly sensitive to subjective interpretation. Following discussions, it was agreed to follow Römer's (2005: 87–88) criteria ("procedural", "extension over a certain time span" vs. "short-term actions", "punctiform") as closely as possible. The label 'unclear' was applied for cases which lacked the necessary context to make a reliable decision on any variable.

<footnote n="3">³ Many thanks to Tatjana Winter for her meticulous annotation work and insightful comments, which helped improve the procedure.</footnote>
<table><caption>Table 1: List of the manually annotated functional variables (derived from Römer 2005, 2006) with examples from the TCC and SpokenBNC2014 sample.</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><strong>Continuousness</strong></td><td>Are you still <strong>using</strong> the computer?<br>Yes Mom, but I'm almost done! &lt;TCC: Piece of Cake 6e&gt;</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Non-continuousness</strong></td><td>Well I said to your dad <strong>are you going</strong> up again? And he said well not next week but maybe the week right after &lt;BNC2014: SA2J&gt;</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Repeatedness/habits</strong></td><td>Lisa is here, too. In the music shop? You <strong>aren't buying</strong> CDs again, are you? &lt;TCC: Green Line 2&gt;<br>Oliver: So, Paul, I didn't know you played the guitar. When did you start playing?<br>Paul: Erm, <strong>I've been playing</strong> for about five years. &lt;TCC: Access 2&gt;</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Non-repeatedness</strong></td><td>Hello, good morning, my name is James Williams, and I'm calling about the basketball coach ad. &lt;TCC: Piece of Cake 4e&gt;</td></tr><tr><td><strong>General validity</strong></td><td>her mum's a middle aged woman she's carrying a bit of weight around her stomach but she doesn't she's not fat but she's not skinny &lt;BNC2014: SAMQ&gt;</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Politeness or softening</strong></td><td>But your warm, generous father is unlikely to want to support the project, and I was wondering how to finance it. &lt;TCC: New Bridges 2e&gt;<br>I was hoping it might be in slightly better condition than that &lt;BNC2014: SA2J&gt;</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Emphasis/shock</strong></td><td>Mrs T: Not bad, Sam. Lake Windermere is the largest lake in England, but <strong>I'm asking</strong> about all of Great British.<br>You mean Scotland and Wales too, Miss? &lt;TCC: Access 2&gt;<br>That's hard.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>You're telling me!</strong> &lt;TCC: Hi There 6e&gt;</td><td><strong>Gradual change/development</strong><br>yeah think it'll be alright is that the butter?<br>yeah it is<br>wow <strong>I'm getting</strong> really hungry now &lt;BNC2014: SB9K&gt;</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Framing</strong></td><td>I had a terribly embarrassing experience once when I <strong>was trying</strong> to buy a rail ticket in France. &lt;TCC: Solutions Intermediate Plus&gt;</td></tr></tbody></table>

## 2.3 Calculating the frequency of progressives

To calculate the relative frequency of progressives, the two corpora were additionally tokenised, dependency parsed and POS-tagged using spaCy (Honnibal & Montani 2017). The POS and syntactic dependency parsing information was used to identify all finite verb phrases (FVP) and their head verb lemma using a custom R script (Le Foll forthcoming). This allowed for a normalisation basis to calculate the relative frequency of progressives that excludes non-finite verbs. This was necessary because these are not included in the progressive count either (see 2.2). To compare the relative frequencies of the progressive, Smitterberg (2005: 45–48) also advocates the exclusion of certain constructions in which the progressive never occurs from the normalisation baseline, i.e., imperative and BE *going* to + *V*<sub>infinitive</sub> constructions. Automatically excluding imperatives proved computationally difficult, but since BE *going* to + *V*<sub>infinitive</sub> constructions were captured by the CQL extraction process, and manually tagged for exclusion from the progressive count, these could easily be subtracted from the total verb count. In the present study, the relative frequency of the progressive was thus measured as:
$$ (2) \qquad \text{Rel. freq.}_{\text{PROG}} = \frac{N_{\text{PROG}}}{(N_{\text{FINITE\_VERB\_PHRASES}} - N_{\text{PROG}} - N_{\text{GOING\_TO}})} \times 10,000 $$

## 2.4 Comparing frequencies

All $\chi^2$ tests conducted for this chapter were performed using the default settings of the `chisq.test()` function in base R. As such, Yates' continuity correction was applied for all two-by-two tables. A prerequisite for $\chi^2$ tests is that the observations be independent. Although arguably the most widely used significance test in quantitative (corpus) linguistics, it can be convincingly argued that this condition is not met since many of the progressives under study will come from the same textbook (volume or series) and have therefore been written by the same group of authors. Some will even come from the same text (but cf. Le Foll 2020 on the difficulty of defining text units in school textbooks). Since the majority of the speakers of the Spoken BNC2014 can be expected to have produced more than one progressive, the same issue occurs with the natural conversation data. However, this is much less likely to yield undue influence on the results because only a small subset of progressives was randomly sampled from the full corpus. For the purposes of this study, every FVP is considered an independent data point. Nonetheless, all quantitative comparisons were additionally tested for potential differences across the nine textbook series, five textbook proficiency levels, and three countries of use (France, Germany or Spain). For reasons of space, the results of these comparisons are only reported when significant patterns emerged.

The results of the null-hypothesis significance tests are complemented with effect size measures. In the case of two-by-two comparisons, $\phi$ coefficients are used. For larger contingency tables, Cramér's V is reported. Both were calculated using the default parameters of the `assocstats()` function from the {vcd} package (Meyer, Zeileis & Hornik 2020). The {vcd} package was also used to produce the association plots used to visualise the results.

## 2.5 Collostructional analysis

Collostructional methods (cf. Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) aim to measure the strength of the relationship between a construction (e.g., the progressive) and a collexeme (e.g., the verb PUT). The advantage of such a bidirectional measure is that the resulting metric, collostructional strength (hereafter CollStr), assesses whether the co-occurrence frequency of a collexeme in a construction is significantly different to what we would expect under the assumption of no association given the construction's and collexeme's overall frequencies within a corpus.

In this paper, two progressive vs. non-progressive Distinctive Collexeme Analyses (henceforth DCA) (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004) were conducted using the {coll_analysis} package for R (Gries 2019a): one DCA for the TCC and one for a sample of the Spoken BNC2014. The results are used to compare the extent to which individual lexical verbs are attracted to either the progressive or non-progressive constructions in textbook and naturalistic BrE conversation.

For both datasets, the total number of FVP per verb lemma were automatically counted using the using POS tags and dependency information from the Spacy model (see 2.3). The counts of the progressive FVPs, on the other hand, were the result of the manual post-
processing of the CQL query hits (see 2.2), which, for the TCC, narrowed down the 3,380 query results to 2,423 annotated progressives. This number corresponds to the total number of FVP in the progressive listed in the example contingency table for the lemma SAY in the TCC printed in Table 2.

<table><caption>**Table 2: Contingency table for SAY in the TCC**</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>SAY as the main verb<br>of a FVP</th><th>FVPs with main verb<br>other than SAY</th><th>Row totals</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Progressive</th><td>29</td><td>2,394</td><td>2,423</td></tr><tr><th>Non-progressive</th><td>788</td><td>53,796</td><td>54,584</td></tr><tr><th>Column totals</th><td>817</td><td>56,190</td><td>57,007</td></tr></tbody></table>

Given the high percentage of false positives retrieved by the CQL query (28% in the TCC), manual filtering was inevitable, which is why, unlike the progressive vs. non-progressive DCA of the TCC data, the DCA of the natural conversation data could not be conducted on the full Spoken BNC2014 corpus. Instead, a random sample of 57,007 FVPs, corresponding to the total number of FVPs in the TCC, was extracted from the Spoken BNC2014. Within this sample of FVPs, the CQL query returned 4,641 hits, which were manually filtered for progressives (see 2.2). This process resulted in a total of 3,444 progressives (see Table 3), of which the first 2,423 were annotated in detail following the procedure outlined in 2.2.

<table><caption>**Table 3: Contingency table for SAY in the Spoken BNC2014 sample**</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>SAY as the main verb<br>of a FVP</th><th>FVPs with main verb<br>other than SAY</th><th>Row totals</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Progressive</th><td>214</td><td>3,230</td><td>3,444</td></tr><tr><th>Non-progressive</th><td>1,655</td><td>51,908</td><td>53,563</td></tr><tr><th>Column totals</th><td>1869</td><td>55,138</td><td>57,007</td></tr></tbody></table>

Controlling for the total number of FVPs allowed for a better comparison of the results of the two parallel DCAs because the log-likelihood ratio ($G^2$) association measure which was chosen as the basis of the CollStr calculation is highly sensitive to sample size (like other association measures, see e.g., Gries 2019b: 388–390). The results of the two DCA were first analysed individually. Then, the CollStr values were standardised and visually compared by means of a scatterplot.

All quantitative analyses were supplemented with extensive close reading of the relevant concordance lines, examples of which are given throughout the following results and discussion sections.

# 3 Results

## 3.1 Frequency of progressives

The frequency of progressives in the TCC was found to be 395.5 progressives per 10,000 finite verb phrases (FVPs). By contrast, there were 558.0 per 10,000 FVPs in the Spoken BNC2014 sample. The results therefore make clear that, even when accounting for the lower number of verbs and FVPs in the TCC, the frequency of progressives is
considerably lower in the TCC than in the Spoken BNC2014 ($\chi^2(1) = 191.81, p < 0.001$, $\varphi = 0.038$). This finding contradicts the claim made by Biber & Reppen (2002: 203) that the progressive aspect is overrepresented in textbook representations of natural conversation.

## 3.2 Morphosyntactic features

The following sections compares the morphosyntactic features of progressive constructions in textbook and natural conversation. The following analyses are based on all 2,423 progressives retrieved and annotated from the TCC, as compared to a random sample of 2,423 annotated progressive concordance lines from the Spoken BNC2014.

### 3.2.1 Tense, aspect and modality

This section begins with an exploration of the results of the TCC vs. Spoken BNC2014 comparisons across all textbook levels as in Römer's (2005) study. Römer (2005: 244) reported that textbook dialogues overuse the present progressive as compared to natural BrE conversation. At first sight, the distributions of forms of the progressive (see Table 4) appear to back this finding for the more recent school EFL textbooks featured in the TCC, too. Additionally, Römer (2005: 271) observed an underrepresentation of perfect progressives with a number of high-frequency verbs (e.g., ASK, GO, PLAY and STAY). The results presented in Table 4, however, suggest that perfect progressives are, if anything, overrepresented in textbook dialogues as compared to the Spoken BNC2014.

<table><caption>Table 4: Distribution of progressive tense forms</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample,<br>N = 2,423</th><th>Textbook Conversation,<br>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>past</td><td>705 (29%)</td><td>381 (16%)</td></tr><tr><td>perfect</td><td>109 (4.5%)</td><td>157 (6.5%)</td></tr><tr><td>present</td><td>1,518 (63%)</td><td>1,833 (76%)</td></tr><tr><td>modal</td><td>91 (3.8%)</td><td>52 (2.1%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Pearson's $\chi^2(3) = 145.57, p < 0.001$, Cramér's $V = 0.173$

The final 'modal' category agglomerates all progressive forms with CAN, COULD, HAVE TO, MAY, MUST, SHOULD, WILL and WOULD. Though still very marginal, the proportion of modal progressives relative to other progressive forms is almost twice as high in the Spoken BNC2014 sample as in the TCC (see Table 4). In the Spoken BNC2014, WILL and WOULD clearly dominate (3)–(4), whereas the textbooks feature the full range of modal progressive constructions, e.g., (5), thus with very low frequencies of occurrence for each modal type per textbook series.

(3) Nunnington Hall **will be reopening** soon cos it will it?
closes over winter <BNC2014: SQ4F><fnref n="4" />

<footnote n="4">⁴ In these and the following examples, progressive verbs have been highlighted in bold. The code between the angle brackets corresponds to the name of the corpus from which the example was taken; that is either the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014) or the Textbook Conversation Corpus (TCC), followed by either the conversation ID for the BNC2014 or the title of the textbook volume for extracts from the TCC (see Appendix 1).</footnote>
(4) yeah well you've got so many things on your plate anyone **would be feeling** the same
<BNC2014: SRNT>

(5) Mum: I hope you're not getting involved with that brother of hers. Rob isn't the sort of boy you **should be mixing** with. <TCC: Green Line New 3>

Fig. 1 is an association plot of the data summarised in Table 4. For each cell in Table 4, the height of the bars corresponds to the difference between the observed and expected frequencies divided by the squared root of the expected value, also known as the Pearson residual. The width of the bars is proportional to the squared root of the expected value, whilst the colour indicates the sign of the residual and its relative importance: the more intensive, the greater the deviation from the expected value. In other words, Fig. 1 shows that the most striking difference in form distribution is – contrary to what the values reported in Table 4 may suggest – observed in the past progressive, rather than in the present progressive. Whilst all categories make significant contributions to the χ² statistic at the significance level of 0.01, the past progressive is the category that makes the greatest contribution to this difference in the distribution of progressive forms across the two corpora.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Association plot comparing the progressive form distributions in the Spoken BNC2014 sample and the TCC</figcaption></figure>

Given that more complex forms such as past, perfect and modal progressives are unlikely to be introduced in the first few years of EFL instruction, the distribution of progressive forms was also subdivided by textbook level (see Table 5 and Fig. 2). As expected, the beginner textbooks almost exclusively feature present progressive forms, whilst perfect and modal progressives are not introduced until the third year of EFL instruction. It is also worth noting that, once they have been introduced, perfect progressives are in fact overrepresented in textbook conversation. Modal progressives, on the other hand, are introduced more gradually. Fig. 2 shows that the present progressive is not overrepresented in more advanced textbooks. Crucially, however, it makes clear that past progressives are underrepresented across all textbook levels.
<table><caption>Table 5: Distribution of progressive tense forms across the five proficiency levels of the TCC (level A = first year of EFL in lower secondary school, level E = fifth year, see Appendix 1) as compared to the Spoken BNC2014 sample</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Level A,<br>N = 316</th><th>Level B,<br>N = 565</th><th>Level C,<br>N = 622</th><th>Level D,<br>N = 577</th><th>Level E,<br>N = 343</th><th>Spoken BNC2014,<br>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>past</th><td>1 (0.3%)</td><td>84<br>(15%)</td><td>130<br>(21%)</td><td>114<br>(20%)</td><td>52<br>(15%)</td><td>705 (29%)</td></tr><tr><th>perfect</th><td>0 (0%)</td><td>3<br>(0.5%)</td><td>63<br>(10%)</td><td>61<br>(11%)</td><td>30<br>(8.7%)</td><td>109 (4.5%)</td></tr><tr><th>present</th><td>314<br>(99%)</td><td>476<br>(84%)</td><td>421<br>(68%)</td><td>385<br>(67%)</td><td>237<br>(69%)</td><td>1,518 (63%)</td></tr><tr><th>modal</th><td>1 (0.3%)</td><td>2<br>(0.4%)</td><td>8 (1.3%)</td><td>17<br>(2.9%)</td><td>24<br>(7.0%)</td><td>91 (3.8%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Pearson's $\chi^2(15) = 373.52, p < 0.001$, Cramér's $V = 0.16$

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2: Association plot comparing the progressive tense forms across the five textbook levels of the TCC (see Appendix 1) and the Spoken BNC2014 sample</figcaption></figure>

### 3.2.2 Contractions

In spoken English, verb contractions are very frequent and, indeed, out of the 2,423 progressive concordance lines extracted at random from the Spoken BNC2014, over half (53%) feature a contracted form of the auxiliary BE. Taken as a whole, the proportion of contracted forms in the TCC is only marginally lower (46%) than that of the reference corpus ($\chi^2(1) = 20.87, p < 0.001, \phi = 0.07$). However, a more fine-grained view of the proportions per textbook series reveals a rather different picture (see Table 6).
<table><caption>Table 6: Full and contracted forms of the progressive in the Spoken BNC2014 sample and across the nine textbook series of the TCC</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Contracted</th><th>Full</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Spoken BNC2014 sample (N = 2,423)</td><td>1,285 (53%)</td><td>1,138 (47%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Access (N = 418)</td><td>226 (54%)</td><td>192 (46%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Achievers (N = 101)</td><td>43 (43%)</td><td>58 (57%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: English in Mind (N = 242)</td><td>138 (57%)</td><td>104 (43%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Green Line (N = 139)</td><td>60 (43%)</td><td>79 (57%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Hi there (N = 213)</td><td>94 (44%)</td><td>119 (56%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Join the Team (N = 119)</td><td>35 (29%)</td><td>84 (71%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Green Line New (N = 1409)</td><td>182 (44%)</td><td>227 (56%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Piece of cake (N = 163)</td><td>64 (39%)</td><td>99 (61%)</td></tr><tr><td>TCC: Solutions (N = 619)</td><td>283 (46%)</td><td>336 (54%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

The two lowest proportions of contracted forms come from French textbooks: *Join the Team* (Nathan) and *Piece of Cake* (Le Livre Scolaire). By contrast, the dialogues of the German series *Access* (Cornelsen) and the Spanish edition of *English in Mind* (Cambridge University Press) display ratios of contracted to full forms of the progressive that are very similar to those observed in the Spoken BNC2014. It is also notable that the frequencies of contracted progressives in the dialogues of the series Green Line (Klett) are just as low in its 2014–2018 edition (Green Line New) as in the older version dating from 2006–2009 (Green Line), though this still represents a notable improvement on the percentage of contracted progressives reported in Römer (2005: 245), namely 32.90%.

### 3.2.3 Negation

Römer (2005: 250–251) reported a considerable underruse of negated progressives in textbook dialogues with shares of negated progressives almost twice as high as in her reference spoken BrE data. As a possible explanation, she advanced that textbook conversation may be “closer to writing than to actual speech” (Römer 2005: 250). In the present study, the proportion of negated progressives observed in the TCC is only very marginally lower than in the Spoken BNC2014 sample (see Table 7). Interestingly, this difference is not due to higher proportions of negated progressives in more recent textbooks publications, but rather because the Spoken BNC2014 has a lower share of negated progressives (6.5%) than Römer’s reference corpora (7.98% and 8.59%).

<table><caption>Table 7: Negated and non-negated progressives</caption><thead><tr><th>Form</th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample<br>N = 2,423</th><th>Textbook Conversation<br>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>negated</td><td>157 (6.5%)</td><td>123 (5.1%)</td></tr><tr><td>non-negated</td><td>2,266 (94%)</td><td>2,300 (95%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Pearson's $\chi^2(1) = 4.13, p < 0.001, \phi = 0.03$
However, qualitative differences in the functional and semantic contextual use of negated progressives were observed. Thus, in textbook conversation, negated progressives are typically found where an action is not taking place (6) or a state is negated (7).

(6) What's he doing? I don't know he **isn't answering** his phone. <TCC: Solutions Pre-Intermediate>

(7) Sue, you **aren't wearing** your sports kit. P.E. starts in ten minutes. <TCC: Solutions Intermediate>

By contrast, naturally occurring spontaneous conversation features many misunderstandings which call for clarifications, and these frequently rely on negated verbs in the progressive (8)–(9).

(8) I **am not talking** about finding a job <BNC2014: S2FQ>

(9) hold on we're **not using** that one <BNC2014: S632>

### 3.2.4 Questions

Römer (2005: 252) observed almost twice as many progressives in interrogative contexts in textbook dialogues as in naturally occurring speech. This trend is confirmed in the present analysis, albeit with a very small effect size (see Table 8).

<table><caption>**Table 8: Interrogative and non-interrogative progressives**</caption><thead><tr><th>Form</th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample<br>N = 2,423</th><th>Textbook Conversation<br>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>question</td><td>276 (11%)</td><td>434 (18%)</td></tr><tr><td>statement</td><td>2,143 (88%)</td><td>1,989 (82%)</td></tr><tr><td>unclear</td><td>4 (0.2%)</td><td>0 (0%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Excluding ‘unclear’: Pearson’s $\chi^2(1) = 40.38, p < 0.001$, Cramér’s $V = 0.09$

Textbooks feature many more closed questions in the progressive (10) and questions in the progressive usually query what is happening right now, even in cases where the context of a shared environment probably ought to render this unnecessary (11).

(10) **Are you swimming** in the sea? **Are you playing** golf in the jungle? <TCC: Achievers A2>

(11) **Jenny:** What **are you doing**?
**Terry:** I'm watching TV.
**Jenny:** Why **are you watching** TV? You usually play football on Saturdays.
**Terry:** But it's raining. <TCC: Piece of cake 6e>

By contrast, questions in the progressive in the Spoken BNC2014 are frequently rhetorical (12) or serve to ask for clarification or confirmation (13)–(14), and often do not follow the inverted question syntax featured in the school syllabi (14).

(12) okay get it recorded I'm **guessing**? yeah excellent no one is actually listening to this picking out words okay? <BNC2014: SG87>

(13) **isn't she having** another baby? <BNC2014: SJDM>

(14) **you're not buying** dodgy tablets off eBay or anything? <BNC2014: SPZR>
### 3.2.5 Voice

Smith (2005: chap. 6) reports that progressive passives have seen a dramatic increase in contemporary BrE but demonstrates with cross-register comparisons that conversation still has the lowest relative frequency. The present results confirm low frequencies of passive progressives for both the TCC and the Spoken BNC2014 sample. No significant difference between the two corpora was observed (see Table 9).

<table><caption>**Table 9: Active and passive progressives**</caption><thead><tr><th>Voice</th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample, N = 2,423</th><th>Textbook Conversation, N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>active</td><td>2,399 (99%)</td><td>2,409 (99%)</td></tr><tr><td>passive</td><td>23 (0.9%)</td><td>14 (0.6%)</td></tr><tr><td>unclear</td><td>1 (&lt;0.1%)</td><td>0 (0%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Excluding ‘unclear’: Pearson’s $\chi^2(1) = 1.75, p < 0.186$, Cramér’s $V = 0.02$

However, qualitative differences in the degree of colloquialism can be observed. Out of 23 passive progressives, the Spoken BNC2014 sample features six GET-passives (15) and one HAVE-passive in the progressive (16).

(15) how much **am I getting paid?** <BNC2014: SA7J>

(16) cos I know some women they’re find it a bit difficult mm to cope with the fact that **they’re having their lady bits taken away** <BNC2014: S28F>

These alternative, more colloquial, passive forms are entirely absent from the TCC. Instead, the BE-passives featured are more typical of written genres than spontaneous conversation (17)–(18).

(17) Countries that still use leaded petrol **are being urged** to stop using it [...]. <TCC: Solutions Intermediate Plus>

(18) Today in South Africa about one third of our water **is being wasted** because of old pipes and insufficient infrastructure. <TCC: New Mission 2c>

## 3.3 Functions of the progressive

### 3.3.1 Time reference

As attested by the relatively high proportion of progressives assigned the label ‘unclear’ in Table 10, time reference was undoubtedly the most difficult aspect to code.

<table><caption>**Table 10: Distribution of progressive time reference**</caption><thead><tr><th>Time reference</th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample<br>N = 2,423</th><th>Textbook Conversation<br>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>past</td><td>687 (28%)</td><td>396 (16%)</td></tr><tr><td>past/present</td><td>111 (4.6%)</td><td>169 (7.0%)</td></tr><tr><td>present</td><td>855 (35%)</td><td>1,301 (54%)</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><thead><tr><th>Time reference</th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample<br>N = 2,423</th><th>Textbook Conversation<br>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>future</td><td>237 (9.8%)</td><td>295 (12%)</td></tr><tr><td>general</td><td>272 (11%)</td><td>202 (8.3%)</td></tr><tr><td>hypothetical</td><td>72 (3.0%)</td><td>33 (1.4%)</td></tr><tr><td>unclear</td><td>189 (7.8%)</td><td>27 (1.1%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Excluding ‘unclear’: Pearson’s $\chi^2(5) = 208.2, p < 0.001$, Cramér’s $V = 0.21$

Both Table 10 and Fig. 3 reveal considerable differences in the distributions of the time period referred to by progressive constructions in the TCC and the Spoken BNC2014 sample. The largest numerical differences are found in the categories ‘past’ and ‘present’ time reference, but considering the distribution of forms reported in 3.2.1, this was to be expected. The category ‘past/present’ time reference refers to events and situations which started in the past and are ongoing (19), a category that is overrepresented in textbook conversation. This finding also corresponds to the overrepresentation of present perfect progressive forms in the TCC (see 3.2.1).

(19) Come on! **We’ve been waiting** for fifteen minutes already! <TCC: Green Line 4>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3: Association plot of the distribution of time references of progressives in the TCC and the Spoken BNC2014 sample (excluding progressives with ‘unclear’ time reference)</figcaption></figure>

Fig. 3 also suggests an underrepresentation of the ‘general validity’ (20) and ‘hypothetical’ (21) reference functions in the TCC, as also observed by Römer (2005: 257).

(20) her mum’s not skinny either like her mum’s a middle aged woman she’s **carrying** a bit of weight around her stomach but she doesn’t she’s not fat but she’s not skinny <BNC2014: SAMQ>

(21) but when you’re earning what I’m earning there’s no way I’m **paying** off five hundred pound is there <BNC2014: SJLT>
In addition, cross-tabulations of tense forms and time reference also revealed that BrE native speakers are more likely to resort to modal progressive constructions (foremost WILL + BE + V-ing) to refer to (possible) future events, as in (3), than the (hypothetical) speakers featured in the textbook dialogues.

### 3.3.2 (Non-)Continuousness

Many EFL grammars, and indeed the three Spanish textbook series from the TCC (see Appendix 1), refer to the progressive construction as “the continuous”. This term may mislead learners to believe that progressive constructions always refer to continuous activities, whereas more than a fifth of progressives in the Spoken BNC2014 sample actually refer to ‘non-continuous’ actions (22). In the TCC, progressives are significantly less frequently used to refer to ‘non-continuous’ actions.

(22) so that’s why I kind of like keep my answers short when she’s when she’s **asking** me how I am mm <BNC2014 S954>

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Function</th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample</th><th>Textbook Conversation</th></tr><tr><th>N = 2,423</th><th>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>continuous</td><td>1,831 (76%)</td><td>2,142 (88%)</td></tr><tr><td>non-continuous</td><td>518 (21%)</td><td>275 (11%)</td></tr><tr><td>unclear</td><td>74 (3.1%)</td><td>6 (0.2%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Excluding ‘unclear’: $\chi^2(1) = 131.04, p < 0.001, \phi = 0.14$

A lexical approach to the continuous/non-continuous paradigm provides further insights into the differences between progressive usage in naturally occurring BrE conversation and the dialogues of school EFL textbooks. Thus, it transpires that, in the Spoken BNC2014 sample, SAY is the verb lemma most frequently associated with the non-continuous function in the progressive (N = 77). In this sample, every other progressive occurrence of SAY refers to a ‘non-continuous action’ (23), whereas two thirds of progressive SAY occurrences in the TCC refer to ‘continuous’ actions that are ongoing at the time of speaking (24).

(23) but I read the text and the text **is** basically **saying** that there’s three parts to people <BNC2014: SEKZ>

(24) A: Did they enjoy your talk?
B: I don't think so. I don't think they understand a word of what I said.
A: What's **he** **saying** now?
B: I don't know. It's too noisy in here. <TCC: English in Mind 4>

ASK, GET, HAVE, TAKE and TELL follow a similar trend: in the naturally occurring conversation data, progressive forms with these lemmas frequently express non-continuousness (25), whilst in the textbook dialogues, the focus remains on the procedural (26) or ongoing actions (27).

(25) the last one I saw was erm having to pay tax on tampons oh I haven't seen that one it's it's **asking** the government to get rid of tax on tampons cos it or it's already tax free on crocodile meat <BNC2014: S6MQ>

(26) So, let's get started! I'm sure you've been **asking** yourselves: What makes Seattle so special? <TCC: Green Line New 4>
(27) It's twelve o'clock at night in Edinburgh and we're having a great time, it's incredibly noisy here! <TCC: Achievers A1+>

### 3.3.3 Repeated actions and states

As shown in Table 11, progressives that express repeated actions or states are less frequent in the TCC than in the Spoken BNC2014 (28)–(29).

(28) oh they've taken the one that you put er compostables in and garden rubbish so that means people **are putting** them in the black bins < BNC2014: SRWD>

(29) **she was trying** to multitask everything that was going on in her life
mm
she's she was like getting chest pains and stuff from it <BNC2014: ST47>

<table><caption>Table 11: Progressives referring to repeated and non-repeated actions or states</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Function</th><th>Spoken BNC2014 sample</th><th>Textbook Conversation</th></tr><tr><th>N = 2,423</th><th>N = 2,423</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>non-repeated</td><td>1,679 (69%)</td><td>2,001 (83%)</td></tr><tr><td>repeated</td><td>501 (21%)</td><td>394 (16%)</td></tr><tr><td>unclear</td><td>243 (10%)</td><td>28 (1.2%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Excluding 'unclear': Pearson's $\chi^2(1) = 30.52, p < 0.001, \phi = 0.082$

Although the effect size reported in Table 11 is small, as previously pointed out by Römer (2005: 284), if learners are not adequately exposed to this core function of the progressive, this could potentially lead to genuine misunderstandings. For instance, EFL learners may not recognise the repeated nature of the actions reported on in extracts (28)–(29) from the Spoken BNC2014.

### 3.3.4 Additional functions of the progressives

Table 12 summarises the number of progressives coded with additional functions following an adaptation of Römer's (2005; 2006) functional categories (see 2.2). The null hypothesis that there is no association between the prevalence of any one of these additional functions and the two datasets under study can be rejected for the categories 'framing' and 'gradual change/development'.

<table><caption>Table 12: Progressives in the TCC and the Spoken BNC2014 sample coded for additional functions</caption><thead><tr><th>Function</th><th>Spoken BNC2014<br>sample<br>N = 2,423</th><th>Textbook<br>Conversation<br>N = 2,423</th><th>Association test<br>(~ function +<br>corpus)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>emphasis/shock</td><td>40 (1.7%)</td><td>37 (1.5%)</td><td>χ<sup>2</sup>(1) = 1.1,<br>p = 0.29, φ = 0.06</td></tr><tr><td>framing</td><td>45 (1.9%)</td><td>98 (4.0%)</td><td>χ<sup>2</sup>(1) = 19.56,<br>p < 0.001, φ = 0.24</td></tr><tr><td>gradual change</td><td>66 (2.7%)</td><td>47 (1.9%)</td><td>χ<sup>2</sup>(1) = 9.55,<br>p < 0.005, φ = 0.17</td></tr><tr><td>politeness/softening</td><td>8 (0.3%)</td><td>4 (0.2%)</td><td>χ<sup>2</sup>(1) = 1.36,<br>p = 0.24, φ = 0.08</td></tr></tbody></table>
The considerable overrepresentation of progressives in a framing context in textbook dialogues undoubtedly stems from the fact that the framing function is very much central to descriptions of the progressive in the respective grammar sections. It is given particular emphasis when the past progressive is introduced, as a way of contrasting the past simple and the past progressive. This framing function of the past progressive is modelled in many textbook dialogues, e.g., (30), (31) and (52), but is, in fact, comparatively rare in conversational BrE (see Table 12).

(30) Sorry I missed your call yesterday. I **was having** my dance class when you rang.
<TCC: Hi There 5c>

(31) Well, I **was jogging** in the park and then I found her wandering around, all on her own.
<TCC: Green Line New 2>

3.4 Lexis

The analyses presented thus far have focused on various morphosyntactic and functional aspects of progressive constructions. In the following, the lexis of progressive constructions is examined through the lens of the progressive vs. non-progressive alternation. To this end, the results of two Distinctive Collexeme Analyses (DCAs) are compared in Table 13: negative CollStr values ($G^2$) represent repulsion of the progressive, in other words, attraction to non-progressive constructions. Note that, as explained in 2.5, the results reported on in this section are based on a slightly larger sample of the Spoken BNC2014 (57,007 FVPs, of which 3,444 progressives) than for previous analyses.

<caption>**Table 13: Most significantly distinctive collexemes associated with the progressive (positive $G^2$ values) and the non-progressive constructions (negative $G^2$ values) in the TCC and the Spoken BNC2014**</caption>
<table><thead><tr><th colspan="4">Textbook Conversation (TCC)</th><th colspan="4">Spoken BNC 2014 sample</th></tr><tr><th>lemma</th><th>non-prog (O:E)</th><th>prog (O:E)</th><th>G<sup>2</sup></th><th>lemma</th><th>non-prog (O:E)</th><th>prog (O:E)</th><th>G<sup>2</sup></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>WEAR</td><td>71:7.2</td><td>99:162.8</td><td>227.8</td><td>TALK</td><td>134:13.5</td><td>95:215.9</td><td>464.5</td></tr><tr><td>TALK</td><td>88:12.5</td><td>205:280.5</td><td>218.0</td><td>TRY</td><td>127:17.6</td><td>172:281.4</td><td>337.1</td></tr><tr><td>DO</td><td>206:73.7</td><td>1527:1659.3</td><td>177.8</td><td>DO</td><td>333:182.0</td><td>2766:2917.4</td><td>116.1</td></tr><tr><td>LOOK</td><td>117:44.1</td><td>921:993.9</td><td>90.3</td><td>SAY</td><td>214:109.7</td><td>1655:1759.3</td><td>87.2</td></tr><tr><td>WAIT</td><td>50:10.1</td><td>188:227.9</td><td>88.1</td><td>GO</td><td>325:192.9</td><td>2960:3092.4</td><td>86.6</td></tr><tr><td>GO</td><td>205:104.9</td><td>2263:2363.1</td><td>83.4</td><td>JOKE</td><td>15:0.9</td><td>0:14.1</td><td>85.1</td></tr><tr><td>TRY</td><td>55:13.1</td><td>253:294.9</td><td>81.1</td><td>LOOK</td><td>101:38.6</td><td>556:618.7</td><td>77.3</td></tr><tr><td>KID</td><td>13:0.7</td><td>3:15.3</td><td>67.0</td><td>WORK</td><td>56:17.6</td><td>243:281.5</td><td>59.0</td></tr><tr><td>WORK</td><td>50:14.0</td><td>279:315</td><td>60.2</td><td>COME</td><td>102:46.8</td><td>695:750.6</td><td>53.6</td></tr><tr><td>PLAY</td><td>56:17.4</td><td>353:391.6</td><td>58.4</td><td>SIT</td><td>36:8.7</td><td>113:139.9</td><td>53.4</td></tr><tr><td>PLAN</td><td>17:1.8</td><td>26:41.2</td><td>52.0</td><td>RECORD</td><td>15:1.6</td><td>11:24.9</td><td>50.4</td></tr><tr><td>JOKE</td><td>11:0.7</td><td>5:15.3</td><td>50.1</td><td>KID</td><td>8:0.5</td><td>0:7.5</td><td>45.4</td></tr><tr><td>RAIN</td><td>12:0.9</td><td>9:20.1</td><td>47.9</td><td>PLAN</td><td>12:1.2</td><td>9:19.5</td><td>41.0</td></tr><tr><td>STAND</td><td>20:3.7</td><td>67:83.3</td><td>38.5</td><td>RAIN</td><td>8:0.6</td><td>2:9.6</td><td>35.1</td></tr><tr><td>STUDY</td><td>18:3.1</td><td>56:70.9</td><td>36.5</td><td>PLAY</td><td>30:8.7</td><td>119:140.3</td><td>35.0</td></tr><tr><td>LIE</td><td>12:1.4</td><td>21:31.6</td><td>34.4</td><td>STRUGGLE</td><td>9:0.8</td><td>4:12.6</td><td>34.6</td></tr><tr><td>WALK</td><td>27:7.6</td><td>151:170.4</td><td>32.3</td><td>DRINK</td><td>18:3.6</td><td>43:57.5</td><td>33.3</td></tr><tr><td>SMILE</td><td>11:1.4</td><td>21:30.6</td><td>30.2</td><td>WAIT</td><td>22:5.5</td><td>71:87.5</td><td>31.7</td></tr><tr><td>PREPARATION</td><td>8:0.7</td><td>9:16.3</td><td>27.8</td><td>WEAR</td><td>18:3.9</td><td>49:63.2</td><td>30.0</td></tr><tr><td>THINK</td><td>27:67.4</td><td>1558:1517.6</td><td>-33.1</td><td>REMEMBER</td><td>1:18.3</td><td>311:293.7</td><td>-29.9</td></tr><tr><td>HAVE</td><td>59:116.2</td><td>2675:2617.8</td><td>-37.1</td><td>GET</td><td>121:189.9</td><td>3113:3044.5</td><td>-31.9</td></tr><tr><td>LET</td><td>3:33.1</td><td>775:744.9</td><td>-47.3</td><td>MEAN</td><td>2:26.5</td><td>449:424.8</td><td>-40.2</td></tr><tr><td>LOVE</td><td>0:23.1</td><td>544:520.9</td><td>-47.5</td><td>SEE</td><td>11:56</td><td>943:898.0</td><td>-57.1</td></tr><tr><td>SEE</td><td>8:57.7</td><td>1350:1300.3</td><td>-70.8</td><td>HAVE</td><td>94:187.7</td><td>3102:3008.6</td><td>-63.2</td></tr><tr><td>WANT</td><td>2:50.1</td><td>1176:1127.9</td><td>-86.3</td><td>WANT</td><td>3:51.4</td><td>873:824.5</td><td>-83.4</td></tr><tr><td>BE</td><td>16:845.5</td><td>19876:19046.5</td><td>-1962.2</td><td>BE</td><td>56:1237.4</td><td>21020:19838.7</td><td>-2691.1</td></tr></tbody></table>
In both halves of Table 13, the collexemes that display a much stronger attraction to the progressive than the non-progressive belong to the broad semantic domain of activity verbs (e.g., TALK, DO, GO, WORK, PLAY, STUDY). This corresponds to a prototypical use of the progressive, often the very first one to be introduced in EFL textbooks (32)–(33).

(32) Present progressive: To say that somebody is currently in the process of doing something. E.g. She **is watching** TV. <Green Line 1>

(33) Present progressive: To talk about things that are happening now. E.g. I'm **reading** on the roof. <English in Mind Starter>

Over the course of the manual annotation process, it was noted that some 80 occurrences of the present progressive in the TCC were part of picture or film descriptions. This is because secondary school textbooks rely heavily on picture description tasks as a means of enabling learners to practise using the progressive and textbooks include model dialogues of the intended outcome of such group picture/film description tasks (34). This task effect contributes to the high positive CollStr values of verbs such as WEAR, RAIN, SMILE, STAND and WALK in the textbook data (see Table 13) because they are often found in such picture descriptions (35).

(34) Partner B: Answer Partner A's questions about pictures 1–3.
Use short answers (Yes, he is. / No, he isn't., etc.). Then go back to page 110.

A: In picture 1: **is** the boy **drinking**? B: No, he isn't.

A: Well, is he ...? <TEC: Access 1>

(35) In the first photo, I can see a big crowd of people in a very wide street. They're **standing** on the pavement and they're **watching** a parade. [...] They are **walking** towards us. They're **wearing** raincoats and boots. <TCC: Solutions Pre-intermediate>

The most striking differences between the results of the two progressive vs. non-progressive DCAs are visualised in Fig. 4: each point represents one verb lemma. All verb lemmas are included except BE, which returned very negative CollStr values in both DCAs (see Table 13). It was removed before the CollStr values were standardised (to z-scores) to avoid this one verb exerting undue influence on the results. The scatterplot makes clear that the CollStr values that emerged from the two DCAs are very highly correlated (Pearson's r(447) = 0.98, p < 0.001). We may therefore conclude that there are only few verbs that are considerably more or less attracted to the progressive in the TCC than in the Spoken BNC2014 sample. The labelled points on Fig. 4, however, correspond to the twenty lemmas with the greatest absolute differences in standardised G² values (> |1.25|). The rest of the analysis will focus on these verbs.
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4: Comparison of the standardised CollStr values (scaled and centred G²) returned by the two progressive vs. non-progressive Distinctive Collexeme Analyses (DCAs). Positive values represent attraction to the progressive, negative to the non-progressive construction.</figcaption></figure>

We will begin by examining the bottom left quadrant with negative standardised G² values. These points correspond to verb lemmas repelled by the progressive construction in both corpora. The labelled points in this quadrant are all found to the left of the regression line. These are stative verbs and verbs of involuntary perception that textbooks frequently list as “exception” or “state verbs” that cannot be used in the progressive (cf. Niemeier 2017: 109), e.g., LOVE, LET (in the sense of ALLOW), SEE (as a verb of involuntary sensory perception) and WANT. However, the present results show that, in natural BrE conversation, stative verbs, in particular, do not occur in the progressive quite as rarely as EFL grammars would suggest (36)–(39).

(36) so I ended up going and babysitting well the daughter's probably eleven right something like that erm so I **was** kind of **letting** her be in charge you know <BNC2014: S8BQ>

(37) why don't you let me buy a b Park Lane? no **I'm not letting** you buy Park Lane <BNC2014: SXK5>

(38) and yeah she was like oh she she she **was loving** she **was loving** the fact she was being recorded though like <BNC2014: S6BS>

(39) yeah **are** you **wanting** that tape back? no are you sure? yeah you leave it here <BNC2014: S2KP>

Among the labelled verb lemmas in the bottom left quadrant of Fig. 4, THINK constitutes a special case. It is repelled by the progressive construction in the textbook conversation
corpus, but shows no significant association to either the progressive or the non-
progressive construction in the Spoken BNC2014 sample. A qualitative exploration of the
corresponding concordance lines shows that, in EFL textbooks, THINK is primarily used in
non-progressive constructions to give opinions (40)-(41). In addition, textbook dialogues
feature THINK to express doubt (42) or hedge statements (43).

(40) Jack: What about a book? Oliver: No, **I don't think** that's a good idea. <TCC: Access 1>

(41) I didn't like Celtic music before because **I thought** it was too fast and repetitive.
<TCC: Hi There 6º>

(42) Frank Sinatra? Did he write the song?
Hmmm... **I think** so...? I know he sang it. <TCC: Piece of Cake 5º>

(43) Hi, it's me. Where are you? - Right. Listen! I'm at home. Why don't you come over? There's something interesting, **I think**. <TCC: Hi There 6º>

There is no doubt that these functions are also very common in naturally occurring speech. The qualitative concordance analysis revealed that the difference observed in Fig. 4 is, in fact, foremost driven by just one progressive discourse-structuring phraseme: *I'm/was thinking* (44)–(45), which is almost ten times more frequent in the Spoken BNC2014 (1,899.6 occurrences per 10,000 words in the Spoken BNC2014 [N= 2,444]) than in the TCC (196.7 per 10,000 words [N = 10]).<fnref n="5" />

(44) Stockholm
Copenhagen
Copenhagen yeah I haven't really been to Scandinavia
that's really funny cos **I was thinking** that as well **I was thinking** if grandad was here
yeah <BNC2014: S6JP>

In addition to *THINK*, the remaining verb lemmas to the left of the regression line on Fig. 4, *SAY*, *TALK* and, in many cases, also *TRY*, are also frequently used in natural conversation within relatively fixed discourse-structuring phrasemes that feature present or past progressive forms (45)–(47).

(45) absolutely so now **I was thinking** about it just as **you were talking** and **I was talking** **I was** **thinking** because dad doesn't really want me to have my own life <BNC2014: S6HP>

(46) cos **she was saying** um oh I just want to be on the boat <BNC2014: SBYQ>

(47) yeah like **what I'm trying to say** really is that if had plenty of time <BNC2014: SBG4>

Conversely, Fig. 4 shows that another verb belonging to the semantic domain of
communication, KID, is more strongly associated with the progressive construction in the
TCC than in the Spoken BNC2014 sample (unlike JOKE, which ranks high on both
collexeme lists in Table 13). Whilst textbook authors clearly favour the interrogative
phraseme *are you kidding (me)?* and the explosive *you're kidding!*, the Spoken BNC2014
also features the non-progressive phrase *I kid you not*. Before arguing for the inclusion of
this particular phraseme in textbook dialogues, however, it should be noted that it is very
unevenly dispersed across the Spoken BNC2014: 19 out of the 29 occurrences were
uttered by just one speaker (S0439, a 23 year old female L1 speaker).

<footnote n="5">⁵ The following Sketch Engine CQL query was used to arrive at these frequencies: [word="I"] [lemma="be"] [lemma!="not"] {0,2} [word="thinking"). It allows for small variations on the phraseme such as *I'm/am/was just/yeah/er/like/kind of thinking*, but excludes negated forms which do not fulfil the same discourse function.</footnote>
In a similar vein, the lemma COME is more strongly attracted to the progressive in naturalistic BrE conversation than in the TCC as a result of two phrasemes frequently featured in textbook dialogues: *come on!* (48) and the phrasebook classic *I come from [country/town]* (49). It also worth noting that the most frequent one-to-the-right collocates of COME in the TCC are *on, to, from* and *here*. By contrast, in the Spoken BNC2014, *back, out, in, to* and *up* are most frequently paired with COME and these phrasal verbs are more likely to occur in the progressive, as in (50)–(51).

(48) A rainforest in Cornwall? **Come on**, Lucy, it can't be real... England isn't hot enough for a rainforest. <TCC: Access 2>

(49) I **come from** South Africa. I'm joyful and friendly. <TCC: Piece of Cake 5>

(50) if your doctor occupational health whoever say it needs to be February it'll be February but I'm thinking in my mind **I should be coming back** January <BNC2014: SMW8>

(51) better watch the dog now
**are you coming out?**
yes
we'd better put the dogs on a lead cos the chickens are out there <BNC2014: S2XJ>

To the right of the regression line in Fig. 4 we find verbs that are more strongly associated with the progressive in the TCC than in the Spoken BNC2014. The case of KID has already been discussed. As noted in the discussion of the results in Table 13, DO, PLAY and STUDY are instantiations of the kinds of activity verbs that are frequently used by textbook authors as model, prototypical verbs for the progressive construction. Similarly, WEAR, STAND and SMILE have been shown to be frequently featured in textbook dialogues modelling picture description tasks designed to provide learners with the opportunity to practise using the progressive.

The remaining lemma on this side of the scatterplot, WAIT, is also associated with how the progressive is traditionally taught in EFL textbooks and grammars: textbook authors make frequent use of WAIT as a means of featuring present and past perfect progressives in dialogues (19). It is also a useful verb to demonstrate the progressive's framing function (see 3.3.4) (52).

(52) A full-blown fight broke out between the two groups and someone went to get a teacher. While we **were waiting** out outside the head teacher's office, we got talking and he said something that made me laugh. <TCC: Solutions Intermediate>

Finally, the appearance of the lemma RECORD as a verb noticeably associated with the progressive in the Spoken BNC2014 both in Table 13 and on Fig. 4 is clearly an artefact of the data collection process. The spoken component of the new British National Corpus (BNC2014) was created by encouraging members of the public to record their conversations on their own smartphones (Love et al. 2017: 329). This unusual set-up prompted regular remarks by the interlocutors of the conversations featuring RECORD in the progressive (53). Hence, more than anything else, the presence of RECORD in these results serves as a reminder of the inherent difficulty of obtaining genuinely “authentic” or “naturally occurring” speech data.

(53) oh you're still oh er you're recording? oh you're not recording this?
yes yeah it's perfect perfect talk <BNC2014: SAUR>
## 4 Discussion and limitations

The analyses of the morphosyntactic, functional and lexical aspects of progressives in the TCC and the Spoken BNC2014 presented in the preceding sections have pointed to many idiosyncrasies in the use of the progressive in textbook dialogues as compared to naturalistic BrE conversation. This section begins by revisiting the five research questions (RQs) enumerated in 1.3, before turning to the study's limitations. Section 5 concludes with some remarks on potential pedagogical implications and recommendations for textbook authors, editors and publishers.

Starting with RQ1, contrary to the claim made by Biber & Reppen (2002: 203), the results indicate that progressives are not overrepresented in EFL textbook conversation; if anything, they are, in fact, underrepresented compared to native BrE conversations (see 3.1). As for RQ2, the results highlight both similarities and a few notable divergences in the morphosyntactic contexts of progressives in textbook dialogues as compared to BrE conversation. Past progressive forms were found to be significantly underrepresented in the TCC, even after making allowances for the late introduction of this tense form in school textbook series (see 3.2.1). The TCC also marginally underrepresents contracted forms of the progressive. However, the ratio of contracted to non-contracted progressives varies markedly across different textbook series, with two French series faring particularly poorly (see 3.2.2). Negated progressives were also seen to be underrepresented (see 3.2.3). In contrast, progressives in interrogative contexts are significantly overrepresented (see 3.2.4). In addition, the negated and question-form progressives featured in textbook dialogues differ substantially from those found in naturally occurring speech, both in terms of syntax and pragmatic use. Though the proportions of active and passive progressives are not significantly different, the Spoken BNC2014 features more colloquial GET- and HAVE-passives, whereas the TCC exclusively features *being* + *V<sub>ed</sub>* passive constructions (see 3.2.5).

RQ3 examined the functions of progressives. When taking the effect of the gradual increase in complexity across textbook levels into account, tense, aspect, modality and time references are distributed fairly similarly across the TCC and the Spoken BNC2014. Nevertheless, the results revealed that progressives referring to generally valid statements and hypothetical situations are markedly underrepresented in the TCC (see 3.3.1). Moreover, future progressives are proportionally more frequently expressed with a present progressive, whereas modal constructions, foremost *WILL* + *be* + *V<sub>ing</sub>* , are underrepresented compared to the Spoken BNC2014 (see 3.2.1). Progressive constructions referring to repeated actions and to non-continuous actions are also underrepresented (see 3.3.2–3.3.4). Progressives used in framing contexts were shown to be twice as frequent in the TCC as in the Spoken BNC2014, where they were found to be remarkably rare (see 3.3.4).

In answer to RQ4, whilst some of the trends observed by Römer (2005) were confirmed, others were not. For instance, whereas Römer (2005: 244) reported that textbook conversation overused the present progressive, it was made clear that this trend is only true of beginner textbooks (see 3.2.1). In fact, there may be good pedagogical reasoning behind this choice since present progressives are by far the most frequent variant in spoken English. Also in contradiction with Römer's findings (2005: 271), perfect progressives were not found to be underrepresented once introduced. In alignment with previous research (Römer 2005: 244–266), past progressives, however, are considerably underrepresented across all textbook levels. Furthermore, the more recent versions of the
German textbook series *Green Line* (published 2006–2009 and 2014–2018) still appear to underrepresent contracted progressives (see 3.2.2), though noticeably less so than in the older version examined by Römer (pub. 1995–2000, cf. Römer 2005: 245). Likewise, though negated progressives remain marginally less frequent in textbook dialogues than in BrE conversation (see 3.2.3), the difference is not as striking as in Römer’s data (2005: 250). As observed by Römer (2005: 252), progressives in interrogative contexts were found to be overrepresented in textbook dialogues (see 3.2.4). As for the function of progressives, Römer (2005: 262) concluded that progressives that express repeated actions and states were comparatively rare in textbook dialogues. Though more frequent than in Römer’s data, the present results confirm that they remain underused (see 3.3.3). The non-continuous function of the progressive follows the same trend (see 3.3.2). Finally, like Römer (2005: 267), there is still a strong tendency to emphasise the framing function of the progressive, even though it only represents a rather marginal function in naturalistic spoken BrE (see 3.3.4).

RQ5 was addressed by comparing the results of two progressive vs. non-progressive Distinctive Collexeme Analyses (DCAs). Some of the differences in the lexis of progressives were attributed to textbook authors’ attempts to demonstrate typical functions of the progressive (e.g., DO, PLAY and STUDY as activity verbs, WAIT as a framing verb), as well as textbook task effects (e.g., WEAR, SMILE, STAND in the context of picture description tasks). Other differences were traced back to an overrepresentation of phrases typical of the early stages of EFL instruction (e.g., I come from), the distinct underrepresentation of phrasal verbs (e.g., COME OUT/BACK/UP, cf. Le Foll to appear on the underrepresentation of phrasal verbs with MAKE) and discourse-structuring phrasemes featuring the progressive in textbook conversation (with verbs such TALK, TRY, THINK and SAY). In addition, some stative verbs were found to be more strongly associated with non-progressive constructions in the TCC than in Spoken BNC2014 (e.g., WANT, LOVE), thus showing that textbook authors foremost feature prototypical uses of the progressive.

Before turning to some potential implications of these results, a few words regarding the study's limitations are in order. First, the choice of a BrE reference corpus may reasonably be questioned. As has already been argued in 2.1, the Spoken BNC2014 bears the advantage of, to date, being the largest corpus of spontaneous everyday conversation by native speakers of English. Although the situation is no doubt evolving, for now, BrE remains the de facto target norm in the majority of European secondary schools. Indeed, aside from individual texts and more rarely chapters, is the first variety of choice in the textbooks of the TEC. Further research avenues, however, could consider comparing the present results with a corpus of spoken American English and/or of proficient speakers of English as a Lingua Franca.

Second, in line with Römer’s (2005) early study on progressives in textbook’s representations of spoken language, the present study focuses exclusively on the representations of the progressive in just one textbook register: conversation. Controlling for register was crucial for the results to be meaningful; however, further studies may consider exploring additional text registers (Le Foll forthcoming examines progressives in textbook fiction), as well as textbooks used in other countries and educational contexts.

Finally, the results of the collostructional analysis are subject to the obvious limitation that such a method based solely on verb lemmas cannot account for verb polysemy and phrasal/prepositional usage. In the case of the verbs discussed in 3.4, all quantitative results emerging from the DCAs were carefully checked by searching and examining the relevant concordance lines. For instance, all 111 occurrences of LET in the progressive
were manually checked across the entire Spoken BNC2014 to ensure that the observed
difference in progressive vs. non-progressive usage was not due to conversations from the
reference corpus revolving around renting out property (admittedly an unlikely topic for
secondary school textbooks!): in fact, only four out of the 111 occurrences were not
progressive uses of LET in the sense of ALLOW. For other verbs, the results were less clear-
cut: for example, SEE in the progressive was found to be used both in its metonymically
motivated sense of MEET or DATE, as well as a verb of sensory perception in both the
Spoken BNC2014 and the TCC. The issue of polysemy is even more thorny where the
comparison of the DCAs did not reveal any noteworthy differences. Here, however, the
fact that the full datasets were manually annotated proved helpful to detect any uncovered
patterns related to the different senses of high-frequency polysemous verbs. One such
discerned pattern concerns the verb GO, which is not featured on either Table 13 or Fig. 4.
Over the course of the manual annotation and interpretation of the results of the DCAs, it
became clear that a substantial proportion of progressive forms of GO in natural BrE
conversation result from colloquial, quotative uses of the verb. This is not reflected in the
CollStr values reported in Table 13 because, although quotative uses of GO are entirely
absent from the TCC, GO is one of the textbook authors' verbs of choice for progressives
with future time reference (see 3.3.1). These observations confirm the need to combine
quantitative and qualitative methods to identify patterns that may have practical, in the
present case, pedagogical implications.

(54) so then people are like oh so what are we gonna do instead? and people start suggesting things and that are getting really tetchy then cos people are kind of like taking over or sort of saying you know like one person will say something and if a few people like it you've suddenly got a whole group of people that are going oh yeah we should definitely do this <BNC2014: S2C9>

# 5 Implications and conclusion

In light of these results and limitations, we may therefore ask, on the one hand, which of
the differences noted in the use of progressives in textbook vs. naturalistic BrE
conversation may be pedagogically well-founded and, on the other, which might deprive
learners of valuable exposure to frequent forms with particularly useful communicative
functions. Compared to most earlier studies on textbook English, including Römer (2005),
a major strength of the present corpus design and study is that all the results were
controlled for potential effects due to the range of textbook proficiency levels featured in
the corpus (A1 to B2). Hence, throughout the discussion of the results, it was made clear
that many of the observed differences are probably pedagogically well-founded. This was
shown to be particularly the case for most of the reported differences in terms of tense
form and time reference distributions. For instance, even though it is true that present
perfect and past perfect progressives are overrepresented in level D and E textbook
dialogues compared to the Spoken BNC2014 sample, these are complex verb forms that
learners may need extra exposure to in order to fully acquire them. Similarly, it may also
be argued that since question syntax poses a lot of problems for EFL learners, an
overrepresentation of interrogative progressives may also serve a sound pedagogical
purpose. In contrast, learners' lack of exposure to key functions of the progressive such as
to refer to habits and repeated actions could lead to genuine difficulties in listening and
reading comprehension.
In addition, the results have shown that, in authentic BrE conversation, progressive constructions are very often featured in relatively fixed discourse-structuring phrasemes signalling turn-taking, backtracking, helping to clarify misunderstanding, or used as fluency-enhancing strategies (e.g., *I'm thinking, she was saying, what I'm trying to say is*). Previous research has shown that individual stative verbs are becoming increasingly frequent in the progressive – chief among them, THINK –, as well as progressives phrasemes expressing tentativeness or politeness (*I was hoping, I'm wondering*) (Rautionaho & Fuchs 2020). We may thus speculate that, to a certain extent, some of the differences observed between the textbook and naturalistic BrE conversational data are due to textbook authors not taking account of recent language change. However, given that these highly frequent phrasemes fulfil important discourse functions, their notable underrepresentation can be considered problematic if English learners are to be equipped with the means to successfully communicate in spontaneous conversation (cf. Gilmore 2004; Carter & McCarthy 2017). We know that “mastering a language requires the specific, usage-based learning of a vast array of conventional units” (Langacker 2008: 25) and we have seen that, in natural conversation, the progressive construction offers a convenient set of such units that could easily be integrated in textbook dialogues.

The results of the present study confirm Römer’s (2005: 284) earlier conclusion that the dialogues of EFL “coursebooks provide a rather monolithic view of what progressives can express”. A number of observations, such as the qualitative differences noted in the kind of negated and question-form progressives and the absence of highly frequent discourse-structuring phrasemes, suggest that the world depicted in textbooks remains largely “safe, clean, harmonious, benevolent, undisturbed, and PG-rated” (Wajnryb 1996, cited in Timmis 2016: 5). Excerpts such as (55), featuring polite back-and-forth questioning with activity verbs in the progressive referring to what is happening at the time of speaking, serve to show that, aside from an increased use of contracted auxiliaries, Römer’s (2005) concerns with the way progressives are presented in textbook dialogues have seemingly not yet been taken on board by textbook authors, editors and publishers.

(55) Molly: [...] Let's make some sandwiches.
Archie: OK. There's some ham in the fridge.
Molly: Are there any tomatoes?
Archie: Yes, they're on the table. But there aren't any onions.
Molly: That's OK. I don't like onions.
Archie: What **are you doing**?
Molly: I'm **putting** some salt in my sandwich.
Archie: That isn't salt. It's sugar! <TCC: Solutions Elementary>

We have seen that, at lower proficiency levels (as in (55)), the observed differences between the use of progressive in textbook and naturalistic BrE conversation are largely justified because they simply reflect the prototypical usage of the construction, which, in the didactic reduction of such a complex grammatical phenomenon as the progressive, ought to feature prominently. The present study, however, has shown that most of the observed trends are stable across all the proficiency levels represented in the TCC (cf. Le Foll to appear on how similar patterns have also been observed for other lexico-grammatical features). We may conclude that the present results lend support to Hundt & Vogel's hypothesis that instructed EFL learners' overuse of the prototype of the progressive construction and underuse of its additional functions may be (at least partially) materials-induced.

Excerpts (56) and (57) demonstrate how authentic conversational data can easily be adapted for pedagogical purposes for intermediate learners and above. For example, in (56), learners' attention can be drawn to the semantic difference between the progressive
form *he's putting vinegar on his sandwich* referring to an immediate action happening at the time of speaking and, for the generally valid factual statement, *the vinegar salts the sandwich*, the use of a non-progressive construction. Excerpt (57) could be adapted to demonstrate how meaning can be successfully negotiated among speakers. It begins with an odd-sounding phrase: *I must say this is very nice me*, which is not readily understood by one of the interlocutors. In negotiating its meaning, the other two speakers resort to a series of progressive constructions highly typical of spontaneous conversation.

(56) what's he **putting** on there now? is that vinegar?
yeah
on your sandwich?
yeah it's delicious
yeah that's interesting
it's absolutely delicious pepper and vinegar the vinegar **salts** it
you can tell he comes from a fish and chips background
yeah so your dad had a fish and chips shop
mm <BNC2014: SH4V>

(57) I must say this is very nice me
ha ha funny
what **were you saying** it's very nice?
me
me?
he **was being** typically self-deprecating
well of course </unclear> mm
I don't understand what **you're saying**
**he's trying** to be funny
I'm just **complimenting** myself
**he's complimenting** the chef
oh I've forgotten to put the salt and pepper in the mash
it's fine
okay <BNC2014: SFSZ>

Adequate exposure to conversational phrasemes such as those featured in (57) can contribute to developing learners’ idiomaticity and fluency. It is also known that, for language learning to be most effective, “this exposure should [ideally] occur in the context of meaningful exchanges approximating socially and culturally normal usage events” (Langacker 2008: 25). The snippets of real conversations quoted in (56) and (57) illustrate how corpus-informed materials may help learners acquire a deeper understanding of complex constructions such as the progressive: starting from its prototypical usage with activity verbs referring to actions happening at the point of speaking and, as learners gain in proficiency, moving to less prototypical usage cases, e.g., with stative verbs, to express repeated actions, and within certain formulaic discourse-structuring phrasemes (cf. Niemeier 2017: chap. 6 on cognitive approaches to teaching aspect in English; Meunier 2008 on combining corpus and cognitive linguistics for language pedagogy). Needless to say that the case for corpus-informed teaching materials has long been made (see, e.g., Mindt 1987 for such an early plea; Conrad 2000 on how corpora could “revolutionise” the teaching of grammar); however, the present study has shown that the nine textbook series under study – representing pedagogical materials currently in use in secondary EFL classrooms in three European countries – do not expose EFL learners to the full range of salient forms and functions that progressive constructions typically fulfil in natural conversation.
## Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dirk Siepmann, Peter Uhrig, attendees of the ICAME40, the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the present volume for their many insightful comments and feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

## References

Andersen, Roger W. & Yasuhiro Shirai. 1994. Discourse Motivations for Some Cognitive Acquisition Principles. *Studies in Second Language Acquisition* 16(2). 133–156. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263100012845.

Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen. 2012. After process, then what? A longitudinal investigation of the progressive prototype in L2 English. In Emmanuelle Labeau & Inès Saddour (eds.), *Tense, aspect, and mood in first and second language acquisition* (Cahiers Chronos 24), 131–151. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi.

Belli, Serap Atasever. 2017. An Analysis of Stative Verbs Used with the Progressive Aspect in Corpus-informed Textbooks. *English Language Teaching* 11(1). 120–135. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v11n1p120.

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 1999. *Longman grammar of spoken and written English*. Harlow: Longman.

Biber, Douglas & Randi Reppen. 2002. What does frequency have to do with grammar teaching? *Studies in Second Language Acquisition* 24(02). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263102002048 (3 August, 2017).

Bieswanger, Markus. 2012. Varieties of English in current English language teaching. *Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics* 38(0). https://doi.org/10.5774/38-0-21.

Binnick, Robert I. 2020. Aspect and Aspectuality. In Bas Aarts, April McMahon & Lars Hinrichs (eds.), *The Handbook of English Linguistics*, 183–205. 1st edn. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119540618.ch11.

Bland, Susan Kesner. 1988. The Present Progressive in Discourse: Grammar versus Usage Revisited. *TESOL Quarterly* 22(1). 53–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587061.

Carter, Ronald & Michael McCarthy. 2017. Spoken Grammar: Where Are We and Where Are We Going? *Applied Linguistics* 38(1). 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amu080.

Conrad, Susan. 2000. Will Corpus Linguistics Revolutionize Grammar Teaching in the 21st Century? *TESOL Quarterly* 34(3). 548–560. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587743.

Council of Europe. 2020. *Common European framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume*. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. http://www.coe.int/lang-cefr (1 September, 2020).

Deshors, Sandra C. 2017. Zooming in on verbs in the progressive: A collostructional and correspondence analysis approach. *Journal of English Linguistics* 45(3). 260–290.

Fuchs, Robert & Ulrike Gut. 2015. An apparent time study of the progressive in Nigerian English. In Peter Collins (ed.), *Grammatical Change in English World-Wide*, 373–387. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fuchs, Robert & Valentin Werner. 2018. The use of stative progressives by school-age learners of English and the importance of the variable context: Myth vs. (corpus) reality. *International Journal of Learner Corpus Research* 4(2). 195–224. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.17010.fuc.

Gilmore, Alex. 2004. A Comparison of Textbook and Authentic Interactions. *ELT Journal* 58(4). 363–374. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/58.4.363.
Gilquin, Gaëtanelle. 2018. American and/or British influence on L2 Englishes – Does context tip the scale(s)? In Sandra C. Deshors (ed.), *Varieties of English Around the World*, vol. G61, 187–216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g61.08gil.

Gries, Stefan Th. 2019a. *Coll. analysis 3.5 package for R*. http://www.stgries.info/teaching/groningen/ (14 February, 2019).

Gries, Stefan Th. 2019b. 15 years of collostructions: Some long overdue additions/corrections (to/of actually all sorts of corpus-linguistics measures). *International Journal of Corpus Linguistics* 24(3). 385–412.
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.00011.gri.

Gries, Stefan Th. & Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on “alternations.” *International Journal of Corpus Linguistics* 9(1). 97–129. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.06gri.

Hahn, Angela, Sabine Reich & Josef Schmied. 2000. Aspect in the Chemnitz Internet Grammar. In Christian Mair & Marianne Hundt (eds.), *Papers from the Twentieth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 20)*, Freiburg im Breisgau 1999, 131–139. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Honnibal, Matthew & Ines Montani. 2017. spaCy 2: Natural language understanding with bloom embeddings. *Convolutional neural networks and incremental parsing*.

Hundt, Marianne. 2004. The passival and the progressive passive: A case study of layering in the English aspect and voice systems. In Hans Lindquist & Christian Mair (eds.), *Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English* [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 13], 79–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hundt, Marianne & Katrin Vogel. 2011. Overuse of the progressive in ESL and learner Englishes – fact or fiction? In Joybrato Mukherjee & Marianne Hundt (eds.), *Exploring second-language varieties of English and learner Englishes: Bridging a paradigm gap*, 145–165. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý & Vít Suchomel. 2014. The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On. *Lexicography* 1(1). 7–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40607-014-0009-9.

Langacker, Ronald. 2008. The relevance of Cognitive Grammar for language pedagogy. In Sabine De Knop, René Dirven & Teun De Rycker (eds.), *Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar: A Volume in Honour of René Dirven*, 7–36. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Le Foll, Elen. 2020. Issues in Compiling and Exploiting Textbook Corpora. Presented at the Japanese Association for English Corpus Studies 2020, Tokyo.
https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.32006.60487.

Le Foll, Elen. forthcoming. *Textbook English: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Language of EFL textbooks used in Secondary Schools in France, Germany and Spain*.

Le Foll, Elen. to appear. MAKING tea and mistakes: The Functions of MAKE in Spoken English and Textbook Dialogues. In Zihan Yin & Elaine Vine (eds.), *Corpus Linguistics Meets Language and Literacy Educators: Multifunctionality in English and Pedagogy*. Routledge.

Le Foll, Elen. to appear. Register Variation in School EFL Textbooks. *Register Studies* 3(2).

Leech, G, P Rayson & A Wilson. 2001. *Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English*. Harlow: Longman.

Love, Robbie, Claire Dembry, Andrew Hardie, Vaclav Brezina & Tony McEnery. 2017. The Spoken BNC2014. *International Journal of Corpus Linguistics* 22(3). 319–344. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.02lov.
Mair, Christian. 2012. *Progressive and Continuous Aspect*. In Robert Binnick (ed.), *The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect*, 803–827. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195381979.013.0028.

Mair, Christian & Marianne Hundt. 1995. Why is the Progressive Becoming More Frequent in English? *A Corpus-Based Investigation of Language Change in Progress*. *Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik* 43. 111–122.

Meriläinen, Lea. 2018. The progressive form and its functions in spoken learner English: Tracing the effects of an exposure-rich learning environment. *International Journal of Learner Corpus Research* 4(2). 164–194.
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.17002.mer.

Meunier, Fanny. 2008. Corpora, cognition and pedagogical grammars: An account of convergences and divergences. In Sabine De Knop, René Dirven & Teun De Rycker (eds.), *Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar: A Volume in Honour of René Dirven*, 91–117. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Meunier, Fanny & Céline Gouverneur. 2009. New types of corpora for new educational challenges: Collecting, annotating and exploiting a corpus of textbook material. In Karin Aijmer (ed.), *Studies in Corpus Linguistics*, 179–201. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.33.16meu.

Meyer, David, Achim Zeileis & Kurt Hornik. 2020. vcd: Visualizing categorical data.

Mindt, Dieter. 1987. *Sprache, Grammatik, Unterrichtsgrammatik: futurischer Zeitbezug im Englischen* (Schule und Forschung). Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg.

Niemeier, Susanne. 2017. *Task-based grammar teaching of English: Where cognitive grammar and task-based language teaching meet*. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.

Preisler, Bent. 2002. Functions and Forms of English in a European EFL Country. In Tony Bex (ed.), *Standard English: The Widening Debate*, 239–267. London: Routledge.

Rautionaho, Paula. 2014. *Variation in the progressive a corpus-based study into world Englishes*. Tampere: Tampere Univ. Pr. PhD.
https://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/96287/978-951-44-9636-3.pdf?sequence=1 (14 June, 2019).

Rautionaho, Paula & Sandra C. Deshors. 2018. Progressive or not progressive?: Modeling the constructional choices of EFL and ESL writers. *International Journal of Learner Corpus Research* 4(2). 225–252. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.16019.rau.

Rautionaho, Paula, Sandra C. Deshors & Lea Meriläinen. 2018. Revisiting the ENL-ESL-EFL continuum: A multifactorial approach to grammatical aspect in spoken Englishes. *ICAME Journal* 42(1). 41–78. https://doi.org/10.1515/icame-2018-0004.

Rautionaho, Paula & Robert Fuchs. 2020. Recent change in stative progressives: a collostructional investigation of British English in 1994 and 2014. *English Language and Linguistics* 25(1). 35–60.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S136067431900042X.

Rinker, Tyler W. 2018. *textstem: Tools for stemming and lemmatizing text in R*. Buffalo, New York. http://github.com/trinker/textstem (1 February, 2019).

Römer, Ute. 2005. *Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy: A Corpus-Driven Approach to English Progressive Forms, Functions, Contexts, and Didactics* [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 18]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.18.

Römer, Ute. 2006. Looking at *looking*: Functions and contexts of progressives in spoken English and ‘school’ English. In Antoinette Renouf & Andrew Kehoe (eds.), *The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics. Papers from the 24th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 24)*, 231–242. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Rooy, Bertus van. 2006. The extension of the progressive aspect in Black South African English. *World Englishes* 25(1). 37–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0083-2919.2006.00446.x.

Smith, Nicholas. 2005. *A Corpus-based Investigation of Recent Change in the Use of the Progressive in British English*. Lancaster University PhD thesis. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.594241 (1 March, 2019).

Smith, Nicholas & Paul Rayson. 2007. Recent change and variation in the British English use of the progressive passive. *ICAME Journal* (31). 129–160.

Smitterberg, Erik. 2005. *The progressive in 19th-century English: A process of integration* [Language and Computers 54]. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction of words and constructions. *International Journal of Corpus Linguistics* 8(2). 209–243.

Syrbe, Mona & Heath Rose. 2018. An evaluation of the global orientation of English textbooks in Germany. *Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching* 12(2). 152–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2015.1120736.

Timmis, Ivor. 2016. Humanising coursebook dialogues. *Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching* 10(2). 144–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2015.1090998.

Virtanen, Tuija. 1997. The progressive in NS and NNS student compositions: evidence from the International Corpus of Learner English. In Magnus Ljung (ed.), *Corpus-based studies in English: Papers from the Seventeenth International conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 17)*. Stockholm, May 15–19, 1996, 299–309. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Westergren Axelsson, Margareta & Angela Hahn. 2001. The use of the progressive in Swedish and German advanced learner English – a corpus-based study. *ICAME Journal* (25). 5–30.

Wulff, Stefanie & Ute Römer. 2009. Becoming a proficient academic writer: Shifting lexical preferences in the use of the progressive. *Corpora* 4(2). 115–133. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1749503209000276.

## Appendix

To be able to compare pedagogical materials used in different educational systems, each textbook was labelled for proficiency level on a universal scale of A to E: level A textbooks correspond to the first year of EFL instruction at secondary level, in other words, beginner level to roughly A1 on the CEFR scale (Council of Europe 2020), whilst level E corresponds to the fifth year (CEFR B1–B2). Note that French textbook series only cover the first four years of secondary school (which take place at *Collèges*), which is why, whenever possible, a textbook from the same publisher corresponding to the fifth year of instruction (the first year of *Lycée*) was added. At the time of corpus compilation, Le Livre Scolaire did not produce any textbooks for *Lycées*.

The full bibliographic metadata is available on doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4922819.

<table><caption>Table 14: Composition of the Textbook English Corpus (TEC)</caption><thead><tr><th>Country of use</th><th>Publisher</th><th>Textbook series</th><th>Volume</th><th>Level</th><th>Publication date</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="4">France</td><td rowspan="4">Bordas</td><td rowspan="4">Hi There</td><td>6ème</td><td>A</td><td>2012</td></tr><tr><td>5ème</td><td>B</td><td>2013</td></tr><tr><td>4ème</td><td>C</td><td>2014</td></tr><tr><td>3ème</td><td>D</td><td>2015</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>New Mission</td><td></td><td>2ème</td><td>E</td><td>2014</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><tbody><tr><td rowspan="10">Germany</td><td rowspan="5">Nathan</td><td rowspan="5">Join the Team</td><td>6ème</td><td>A</td><td>2010</td></tr><tr><td>5ème</td><td>B</td><td>2011</td></tr><tr><td>4ème</td><td>C</td><td>2012</td></tr><tr><td>3ème</td><td>D</td><td>2013</td></tr><tr><td>2nde</td><td>E</td><td>2010</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="4">Le Livre Scolaire</td><td rowspan="4">Piece of Cake</td><td>6ème</td><td>A</td><td rowspan="4">2017</td></tr><tr><td>5ème</td><td>B</td></tr><tr><td>4ème</td><td>C</td></tr><tr><td>3ème</td><td>D</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="10">Spain</td><td rowspan="5">Klett</td><td rowspan="5">Green Line</td><td>1</td><td>A</td><td rowspan="5">2006</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>B</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>C</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>D</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>E</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="5">Klett</td><td rowspan="5">Green Line New</td><td>1</td><td>A</td><td>2014</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>B</td><td>2015</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>C</td><td>2016</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>D</td><td>2017</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>E</td><td>2018</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="5">Cornelsen</td><td rowspan="5">Access</td><td>1</td><td>A</td><td>2013</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>B</td><td>2014</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>C</td><td>2015</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>D</td><td>2016</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>E</td><td>2017</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="10">Richmond</td><td rowspan="5">Achievers</td><td>A1+</td><td>A</td><td rowspan="5">2015</td></tr><tr><td>A2</td><td>B</td></tr><tr><td>B1</td><td>C</td></tr><tr><td>B1+</td><td>D</td></tr><tr><td>B2</td><td>E</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="5">Cambridge University Press</td><td rowspan="5">English in Mind</td><td>Starter</td><td>A</td><td rowspan="5">2010</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>B</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>C</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>D</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>E</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="4">Oxford University Press</td><td rowspan="4">Solutions</td><td>Elementary</td><td>A</td><td>2014</td></tr><tr><td>Pre-Intermediate</td><td>B</td><td>2016</td></tr><tr><td>Intermediate</td><td>C</td><td>2017</td></tr><tr><td>Intermediate Plus</td><td>D</td><td>2017</td></tr></tbody></table>

## Contact information

Elen Le Foll
Institute of English and American Studies
Osnabrück University
Neuer Graben 40
49069 Osnabrück
Germany

elefoll@uos.de

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-8010