example of a narrative text from a beginner EFL textbook: it relies on present tense narration and features high frequencies of BE as a main verb and the modal can.

(239) B) Holly **is** at home with her two guinea pigs, Mr Fluff and Honey. They live in the kitchen. But they **aren't** in the kitchen now. They're in Holly's room. It's fun for the guinea pigs on the floor. They **can** explore - everywhere in the room! C) Ding-dong! Who's at the door? It's Holly's best friend Olivia.
D) After Olivia's visit Holly **can** only see Honey under her bed. But where's Mr Fluff? Holly **isn't** happy. She's got a problem. There's an English test today, and she hasn't got her lucky charm with her in the classroom. Where **is** it? Maybe it's in her schoolbag. Oh, but here's the tutor, Mr Swindon, with Luke, Dave - and a new boy in the tutor group.
A) It's a week before project day. The students in Mr Swindon's tutor group have got lots to do. The students **can** work in groups, in pairs, or alone. Who has got the best audio presentation? Dave and Luke **can** do the recordings for everyone in the TTS recording studio.
<TEC: Green Line New 1>

<table><caption>Table 72: Summary of the model: lmer(PC2 ~ 1 + Level + Register + Level*Register + (1|Source))</caption><thead><tr><th>Predictors</th><th>Estimates</th><th>95% CI</th><th>p-value</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>(Intercept) [Conversation] [Ref.]</td><td>-0.52</td><td>-1.27 - 0.24</td><td>0.183</td></tr><tr><td>Level [A]</td><td>-0.54</td><td>-1.35 - 0.28</td><td>0.195</td></tr><tr><td>Level [B]</td><td>-0.15</td><td>-0.96 - 0.66</td><td>0.721</td></tr><tr><td>Level [C]</td><td>0.08</td><td>-0.72 - 0.89</td><td>0.842</td></tr><tr><td>Level [D]</td><td>0.04</td><td>-0.76 - 0.85</td><td>0.915</td></tr><tr><td>Level [E]</td><td>0.07</td><td>-0.75 - 0.89</td><td>0.866</td></tr><tr><td>Register [Fiction]</td><td>2.27</td><td>1.51 - 3.03</td><td><strong>&lt;0.001</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Register [Informative]</td><td>-0.46</td><td>-1.24 - 0.32</td><td>0.25</td></tr><tr><td>Level [A] * Register [Fiction]</td><td>-1.01</td><td>-1.82 - -0.21</td><td><strong>0.014</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Level [B] * Register [Fiction]</td><td>-0.25</td><td>-1.04 - 0.54</td><td>0.532</td></tr><tr><td>Level [C] * Register [Fiction]</td><td>-0.21</td><td>-1.00 - 0.58</td><td>0.602</td></tr><tr><td>Level [D] * Register [Fiction]</td><td>-0.41</td><td>-1.20 - 0.38</td><td>0.307</td></tr><tr><td>Level [E] * Register [Fiction]</td><td>-0.47</td><td>-1.26 - 0.32</td><td>0.246</td></tr><tr><td>Level [A] * Register [Informative]</td><td>0.49</td><td>-0.34 - 1.33</td><td>0.246</td></tr><tr><td>Level [B] * Register [Informative]</td><td>0.59</td><td>-0.22 - 1.40</td><td>0.154</td></tr><tr><td>Level [C] * Register [Informative]</td><td>0.26</td><td>-0.54 - 1.06</td><td>0.524</td></tr><tr><td>Level [D] * Register [Informative]</td><td>0.55</td><td>-0.26 - 1.35</td><td>0.183</td></tr><tr><td>Level [E] * Register [Informative]</td><td>0.33</td><td>-0.49 - 1.14</td><td>0.431</td></tr><tr><td colspan="4" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">Random Effects</td></tr><tr><td>σ<sup>2</sup></td><td>0.45</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>τ<sub>00</sub> Source</td><td>0.15</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>ICC</td><td>0.25</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>N Source</td><td>325</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Observations</td><td>4980</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Marginal R<sup>2</sup> / Conditional R<sup>2</sup></td><td>0.671 / 0.753</td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>
Textbook Fiction texts that score within the range of the Youth Fiction corpus on the second dimension are characterised by high frequencies of past tense (VBD) and perfect aspect (PEAS) verbs, third-person referents (TPP3) and verbs of communication (COMM), but also the modal *could* (MDCO), phrasal verb particles (RP) and adverbs (RB). Note, however, that the latter two features are key contributors to the slightly lower average scores of intermediate and advanced Textbook Fiction texts compared to the Youth Fiction (see Table 72 and Fig. 82). Counter to the author's expectations, lexical diversity (TTR) or average word length (AWL) do not contribute to the observed minor differences between the more advanced Textbook Fiction texts and the reference Youth Fiction corpus.

(240) 'There's no need to be in such a rush,' said Jem, so close now that Joe could see his broken teeth. 'We got a lot of catching up to do.' 'Yoo-hoo! Joe!'

The voice **came** out of nowhere, making **them** all jump. It **was** a girl's voice, and when **he** looked **up**, Joe **saw** that Lil **was** hustling down the street towards **them**. Her cheeks **were** flushed with excitement: it **had** been **her** first night in her show at the theatre, **he realised**, and now **she was** on her way to the party. **She was** wearing a hat wreathed in poppies and **had** a crimson scarf at her neck that **deepened** the red of her lips and cheeks, and made **her** dark hair look glossier than ever. 'I didn't expect to see you **out** here!' **she said** as **she** bounced **up** to him. **Then she** took in the three men. 'Good evening,' **she said** to **them**, **brightly**. <Youth Fiction: Woodfine 2015: The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow>

(241) **He ran back** to Bill. On the way **he picked up** a stick. As **he came** over the hill, **he ran** at the boar, hitting it again and again. It **turned** to face Colm. There **was** blood on its tusks. Bill **tried** to pull himself away, leaving a trail of blood behind **him**. Colm raised the stick high and brought it **down** on the boar's head. The boar **snorted**, but instead of running at Colm, it **turned back** to Bill. Colm **threw** the stick **down** and **grabbed** Bill's gun. **He was** shaking as **he raised** the gun to **his** shoulder. Colm **knew** that if **he shot** the animal in the back, it would only make it wild. **He let** out a scream, a long, loud scream. The boar **turned round**. For a moment it **stared** at **him** with its small black eyes. Then it **lowered** its head and **ran** towards **him**. <TEC: Access G 5>

Fig. 82 clearly shows that, aside from Level A Textbook Fiction, the narrative texts of the TEC are, on average, largely comparable to those of the Youth Fiction on this second dimension. Encouragingly, the Register*Level effect plots in 7.3.2 show that this is also true on the third and fourth dimensions (see Fig. 78 and Fig. 80). It is, however, worth noting that there is a great deal more variation within the Textbook Fiction subcorpus than there is across the much larger Youth Fiction corpus, as evident from the large range of predicted dimension scores on all dimensions and across all proficiency levels (see, e.g., Fig. 74). The Textbook Fiction subcorpus being relatively small (285 texts, ca. 241,500 words) and narrative texts being rather rare in the three French textbook series (see 3.3.1.4), further data from additional
textbooks would be needed to confirm the trends concerning Textbook Fiction reported in this and the previous chapter.

<figure><img src="image_88.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 82: Predicted PC2 scores of the texts of the TEC and the reference corpora</figcaption></figure>

### 7.3.2.3 Textbook Informative vs. Info Teens

The most striking differences between the Textbook Informative subcorpus and Info Teens can be observed on the first dimension. Echoing the results of Chapter 6, Fig. 73 and Fig. 74 indicate that some of the Textbook Informative texts are closer to the interactional, “oral-like” end of the dimension than the Info Teens reference corpus. Fig. 74 also shows some overlap between the ellipses of the Textbook Informative and the Textbook Fiction subcorpora. Thus, we find that a proportion of textbook texts blur the otherwise well-defined register-based distinctions between the three reference corpora that emerge from the combination of the first and second dimension on Fig. 74. As confirmed by the model summarised in Table 71 and visualised in Fig. 81, however, many of the Textbook Informative texts that are not within the ellipse of the Info Teens corpus stem from beginner textbooks. In fact, on the first, third and fourth dimensions, the more advanced informative texts are much more similar to the corresponding reference corpus than the less advanced ones. These proficiency level patterns have already been explored in 6.4 and 7.3.1. Interestingly, the differences
observed between the texts of the beginner Textbook Informative subcorpus and those of the Info Teens corpus are only partially due to more complex linguistic features not being introduced until after the first few years of EFL tuition. Fig. 83 displays normalised counts for a sample of features with high absolute loadings on PC1 that most contribute to the differences observed between textbook and non-textbook informative texts.

Three groups of features can be identified on Fig. 83. The first group consists of complex grammatical features such as passive constructions (PASS) and non-finite present participial constructions (VBN) which, as expected, are very infrequent in beginner informative texts but, as Fig. 83 makes clear, whose frequencies progressively increase as learners progress. Second, we find features such as average word length (AWL) and existential verbs (EXIST) which also have considerably lower rates in beginner textbooks than in more advanced ones, but whose rates in Level E textbooks do not, on average, reach rates quite as high as those observed in the Info Teens corpus. Finally, the third group of interest consists of features that are, across all proficiency levels, more frequent in the Textbook Informative subcorpus than in the reference Info Teens. As these features have high positive-loading weights on PC1, they contribute to the observed shift of Textbook Informative texts towards the middle of the plots in Fig. 72 and Fig. 74. They include singular first- and second-person referents (FPP1S and SPP2) and verbal contractions (CONT) and negation (XX0), which are, on average, considerably rarer in the texts of the Info Teens corpus than in Textbook Informative writing. These differences are exemplified in (242) and (243). The negative-loading features that are, on average, rarer in Textbook Informative texts yet typical of the Info Teens are highlighted in (242), whilst the words in bold in (243) correspond to positive-loading features that contribute to Textbook Informative texts scoring higher on the first dimension than the Info Teens.

(242) Tennyson was the son of an intelligent but unstable clergyman in Lincolnshire. His early literary attempts included a play, The Devil and the Lady, composed at 14, and poems written with his brothers Frederick and Charles but entitled Poems by Two Brothers (1827). In his three years at Cambridge, Tennyson wrote a prize-winning poem, Timbuctoo (1829), and Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and began his close friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian Henry Hallam. Upon the death of his father in 1831, Tennyson became responsible for the family and its precarious finances. His volume Poems (1832) included some of his most famous pieces, such as "The Lotus-Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," and "The Lady of Shalott." In 1833 he was overwhelmed by the sudden death of Hallam. [...] Tennyson passed his last years in comfort. In 1883 he was created a peer and occupied a seat in the House of Lords. Throughout much of his life he was a popular as well as critical success and was venerated by the general public. Ignored early in the 20th century, Tennyson has since been recognized as a great poet, notable for his mastery of technique, his superb use of sensuous language, and his profundity of thought. <Info Teens: factmonster.com>
<figure><img src="image_89.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 83: Normalised counts of selected features with salient loadings on PC1 in the Textbook Informative subcorpus (Levels A to E) and the reference Info Teens corpus (Ref.)</figcaption></figure>

(243) **You** might be surprised at the number of rather unusual sports that exist around the world. Mostly, they are little known outside the areas where they were invented – though occasionally they have gained international recognition. Here are some examples – but, if **you're** interested, have a look on the web. **You** may find other, even crazier, ones!

### Sandboarding

Of course there **can't** be many people who **don't** know what snowboarding is, but how about sandboarding? The basic principle behind the two sports is the same; start at the top of a slope and use a board to get **you** to the bottom. But whereas snowboarding is practised on freezing
cold snowy mountain tops, sandboarding takes place on sand dunes by
sunny beaches or in the desert. It's popular in many countries,
including Australia, Namibia and South Africa. The quickest way of
getting to the bottom involves standing with both feet on a board and
weaving from side to side while trying not to fall off. If this sounds a
little bit adventurous you could always just get on your stomach and
slide down. Either way, it's a lot of fun! However, don't forget to keep
your mouth closed. <TEC: English in Mind 4>

The less pronounced differences observed between the texts of the Info Teens and those of the Textbook Informative subcorpus on the second ‘Narrative vs. Non-narrative’ dimension (see Fig. 82) are largely driven by past tense verbs: we know that they are largely absent from Level A textbooks, but, as soon as this tense and, to a lesser extent, the perfect aspect are introduced, textbooks from Level B onwards tend to feature more past and perfect aspect verbs in informative texts than are generally found in the Info Teens texts. This explains the small overlap between the Textbook Informative ellipse (purple) and the ellipses of the fiction corpora (light and dark green) on Fig. 74.

7.4 Discussion and limitations

In sum, the results of the present chapter can be said to refine the trends observed in Chapter 6. Many of the characteristics of the PCA-based multi-dimensional model of intra-textbook variation presented in 7.3.1 coincide with patterns observed in the intra-textbook additive MDA carried out in 6.3.1. The results of the second additive MDA (6.3.2), which mapped the texts of the Conversation, Fiction and Informative subcorpora of the TEC and of three matching reference corpora onto Biber's (1988) dimensions of general English (6.1.1), are also consistent with the new PCA-based multi-dimensional model of Textbook English proposed in 7.3.2.

In answer to the first set of research questions (see 7.1), considerable register-based
variation can be observed in the language of school EFL textbooks. In fact, a much
larger proportion of intra-textbook variation can be attributed to register differences
than to proficiency levels, country of use, or of any potential idiosyncrasies of specific
groups of authors or editorial policies (as captured by the textbook series variable).
In particular, the visualisations of the model of intra-textbook variation revealed
distinct clusters for the texts of the conversation, instructional and informative
registers on the first few dimensions (as shown, e.g., in Fig. 56 and Fig. 57). The
linguistic interpretation of Table 68, which lists the loadings of the 61 features entered
in the model of intra-textbook variation, highlighted the defining characteristics of
these different text registers frequently featured in secondary school EFL textbooks.
The few proficiency level effects that emerged from the model were explained and
illustrated with textbook excerpts. Additionally, significant interactions between
register-based and proficiency-level-based variation – most notable in the fiction
register (as already observed in Chapter 6) – were also examined. No notable
differences were observed across the three different countries of use of the textbooks
(more on this below), nor were significant patterns of linguistic variation associated
with any specific textbook series.

The second set of research questions asked to what extent Textbook English registers
differ from situationally similar, naturally occurring registers and whether there might
be pedagogically relevant differences between different textbook series and/or the
proficiency level of individual textbook volumes. These questions were addressed in
the second PCA-based multi-dimensional model of Textbook English (7.3.2). The
most striking differences were observed in the textbooks' portrayal of spoken,
conversational English. Section 7.3.2.1 examined in some depth the constellation of
features that make most textbook dialogues fundamentally different from naturally
occurring conversation (as captured by the Spoken BNC2014). These include low
frequencies of many features that are typical of spontaneous speech, including fillers
and interjections, discourse markers and causative subordinators, as well as markers
of interactional discourse such as tag questions, WH-questions, pronouns, as well as
hedges and demonstratives in communicative situations in which interlocutors share
a common environment and, in many cases, common knowledge.

In fairness to the authors and editors of the textbooks featured in the TEC, some of
the observed differences may be due to what is arguably an overly simplistic textbook
register classification scheme (see 3.3.1.4). Indeed, as shown in some of the excerpts
featured in this and previous chapters, the Conversation subcorpus of the TEC also
includes radio and TV interviews which are situationally quite different to the
informal everyday conversations among friends and relatives that constitute most of
the texts of the Spoken BNC2014. Hence, future studies ought to consider re-
annotating the texts of the Conversation subcorpus of the TEC to separate texts
designed to emulate private, casual conversation from those that attempt to replicate
public and broadcasted discussions. This second subset of texts could then be
compared to a corpus of TV and radio language. Though this is likely to somewhat
reduce the observed gap between how spoken English is portrayed in EFL textbooks
and how it is spoken outside the EFL classroom, the trends described in the present
and previous chapters can nonetheless be expected to remain largely the same. This
prediction is motivated by the results of a study preliminary to Chapter 6 which was
conducted before the Spoken BNC2014 was available and therefore relied on a corpus
of TV captions and subtitles instead (a subset of the BBC corpus used in Fankhauser
forthcoming). This study only included the German and French subcorpora of the
TEC but it showed an equally wide gap between Textbook Conversation and
(pseudo-)spoken language as observed in TV news, shows and series (Le Foll 2017).
Some noteworthy differences were also observed between the texts of the Informative
subcorpus of the TEC and those of the Info Teens corpus (7.3.2.3). As compared to
the Conversation register, interactions with the Informative subcorpus of the TEC
and the proficiency level of each textbook texts had a much stronger mediating effect on the placement of Textbook Informative texts on several dimensions of variation. Reassuringly, most of the informative texts featured in the more advanced texts closely resemble those of the reference corpus on all relevant dimensions of variation.

Section 7.3.2.2 confirmed the findings of previous chapters by demonstrating that, excluding the texts from beginner textbooks, Textbook Fiction is closest to its corresponding reference corpus on all dimensions of variation examined. In many respects, this finding is easily explained: unlike dialogues and informative texts which are mostly crafted especially for pedagogical purposes, many of the narrative texts featured in school EFL textbooks are extracts of ‘authentic’, published, popular novels and short stories – samples of which may even feature in the Youth Fiction corpus. That said, a couple of caveats also deserve mention. First, Textbook Fiction is one of the smallest register subcorpora of the TEC, meaning that the sample may not be representative of this register within Textbook English as a whole. Of course, this limitation is true of all the observations made on the basis of the TEC but, of the three textbook registers examined in 6.3.2 and 7.3.2, sparse data is most likely to affect the results concerning Textbook Fiction. Of the 42 textbook volumes of the TEC, some include no or very few fiction texts. In particular, the three French textbook series hardly feature any fiction texts (see Le Foll 2018a) which is worth highlighting because, when differences across textbook series *were* observed in any of the four analysis chapters, these almost always concerned the French textbook series (even though these differences rarely reached statistical significance at a threshold of $p < 0.01$).

This brings us to another aspect of the second set of research questions formulated at the beginning of Chapter 6 and restated in 7.1: *To what extent are (some of) the observed patterns of variation within Textbook English moderated by textbook series or their country of use?* This question goes back to one of the overarching research questions, which asked whether secondary school pupils in France, Germany and Spain are exposed to qualitatively different language input via their English textbooks (see 3.2.1). As has just been mentioned, hardly any significant differences were observed between the language of the nine different textbook series of the TEC – though some minor differences were occasionally observed between the nature of the language presented in textbooks used in France compared to those used in Germany and Spain. One major difference, however, has not yet been taken into consideration. Though it concerns the *quantity* rather than the *quality* of students’ textbook-based language input and is therefore not directly relevant to the present study, it is worth remembering that the French subcorpus of the TEC is the smallest of the three “national” subcorpora (see Fig. 1 in 3.3.1.4). Moreover, as shown in Fig. 84, a large proportion of the language content of these textbooks is actually in French (labelled here as ‘foreign’, see 3.3.1.4). Another large chunk is made up of individual words and
sentences (mostly in the form of exercises). In other words, the French series of the
TEC feature considerably fewer cohesive texts and, in particular, much shorter ones
than in their counterparts used in German and Spanish secondary schools (see Fig. 2
in 3.3.1.4 for comparison).

<figure><img src="image_90.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 84: Proportion of tokens in each register category of the French subcorpus of the TEC (as displayed by Sketch Engine; Kilgarriff et al. 2014)</figcaption></figure>

Hence, although the TEC was constructed as a balanced corpus of textbooks with
three series from each country (see 3.3.1.4), the number of texts and words are not
distributed equally across each series or country of use. However, wordcount totals
are difficult to compare across entire textbook series. This is because, on the one
hand, one of the textbook series used in Spain (*Solutions*) and one of the French ones
(*Piece of Cake*) only feature four rather than five volumes and, on the other, because
the TEC does not include all the transcripts of additional audio/video materials for
one German and one Spanish series (the older version of *Green Line* and *Achievers*)
(see Table 5 and doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4922819 for details). Hence, in Fig. 85, the
distribution of words in the TEC is visualised per textbook volume. The plot shows
the number of words (as calculated by the MFTE) in the Conversation, Fiction,
Informative, Instructional, Personal correspondence and Poetry texts of the TEC (i.e.,
those used in the intra-textbook MDAs in 6.3.1 and 7.3.2). The bars are sorted by
textbook proficiency level since we can expect the number and length of texts to
increase as learners become more proficient in English. This is, indeed, what we
observe in Fig. 85. However, the plot also makes evident that there are major
differences in terms of the quantity of English that students are (potentially) exposed
to via their textbooks.
<figure><img src="image_91.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 85: Cumulative word counts of the Conversation, Fiction, Instructional, Informative, Personal correspondence and Poetry texts for each of the 42 textbook volumes of the TEC</figcaption></figure>

Of course, it goes without saying that not all secondary school pupils learning with these textbooks will engage with every single text featured in the coursebooks; it is perfectly conceivable that some teachers use textbooks more as “sourcebooks” from which to pick and choose the texts and activities they believe to be most suitable for their students (see, e.g., Möller 2016; Schaer 2007). Equally, we can expect many teachers to supplement textbook materials with additional (textbook or non-textbook) materials. Nonetheless, it is quite striking that, across the textbook
proficiency levels A to D (corresponding to *collège* in the French educational system, see Table 3), the three French textbook series contain, in terms of *quantity*, considerably less English-language input than the series used in the German and Spanish educational systems. However, as stated above, all of the results presented so far indicate that the *quality* of this language input is very similar across the three countries represented in the TEC. It is not within the scope of the present thesis to investigate the pedagogical impact of either the quantity and quality of textbook-based language input; however, it is clear that both of these factors, together with a whole host of equally relevant teacher-, learner- and environment-based factors, will undoubtedly mediate learning outcomes.

The final research question formulated at the start of this chapter (7.1) was concerned with identifying the linguistic features that characterise Textbook English registers as compared to situationally similar, naturally occurring texts. Section 7.3.2.1 showed that Textbook Conversation is characterised by a highly nominal style. Its texts are defined by high lexical density and diversity. Hence it displays more diverse and often complex vocabulary than everyday real-life conversation. At the same, however, the results of the second PCA-based model showed that it features far fewer syntactic structures that are characteristic of more complex utterances, e.g., *that* and WH-subordinate clauses and causative subordination (see 7.3.2). Confirming previous analyses (see 5.3.5), phrasal verbs also appear to be conspicuously rare in textbook dialogues, including those featured in the more advanced textbook volumes of the TEC.

Section 7.3.2.3 demonstrated that, in the more advanced textbooks of TEC, informative texts share more similarities with the texts of the Info Teens corpus than differences. Nonetheless, Textbook Informative is, on average, characterised, on the one hand, by shorter words and fewer verbs belonging to the semantic category of existential/relationship verbs (e.g., *INVOLVE, IMPLY, REPRESENT, SEEM*) and, on the other, by higher relative frequencies of first-person singular and second-person references, contracted and negated verbs. Together with the results of the previous chapter, this suggests that some of the informative texts of the TEC can be considered to represent hybrid registers: their linguistic characteristics frequently cross the line between factual and impersonal informative writing, narrative explanations and involved, interactional communication.

As recommended by Lee (2000: 393; see also Biber 1990), the two PCAs that form the basis of the multi-dimensional models presented in this chapter were replicated on random subsets of the data to test the stability and robustness of the presented results. Aside from the inversion of the negative and positive ends of some of the components (which are entirely arbitrary), the results proved to be very stable across the six attempted replications (with randomised subsets of two-thirds of the data) of
each model (the code to run additional subset replications is included in the *Online Appendix 7.7*). The results of the first replication run on such a random subset of two-thirds of the data are visualised in Fig. 86 and 87 (printed in the following chapter). The plots can be compared to Fig. 74 and 76 (from the present chapter) that were computed on the basis of the full dataset. The same trends observed and described in 7.3.2 are evident. In addition to these randomised subset analyses, for each of the two models presented in this chapter, three additional PCAs were conducted using only the texts stemming from 1) the French, 2) the German and 3) the Spanish subcorpora of the TEC (see 3.3.1.1). Only minor differences in the ranking of the feature loadings were observed. The general trends can therefore be said to be stable across all three “national” subcorpora of the TEC which, again, confirms the finding that the language of lower secondary school EFL textbooks is very comparable across the nine series used in France, Germany and Spain that constitute the Textbook English Corpus. Together, these multiple replications testify to the robustness of the methodology described in 7.2.

Given that the results of the present chapter largely corroborate those of the previous chapter, it may be tempting to conclude that some of the additional steps described in this chapter's methodology (7.2) are not entirely necessary. This would, however, be a hasty conclusion on several grounds. For a start, one of the major advantages of the proposed revised framework lies in the replicability and robustness of the results it yields, which can be traced back to the choice of meaningful normalisation baselines for each linguistic feature (7.2.4), the (partial) deskewing of the distributions of these relative frequencies, the exclusion of features absent from a considerable proportion of texts or with very low communalities, and the removal of outlier texts (7.2.6). That said, as argued in 6.5, for a quick, preliminary analysis, conducting an additive MDA using the free and user-friendly MAT tool (Nini 2014) may be sufficient (see also Le Foll 2021b: 29–33). If, however, Biber's (1988) dimensions and the data underlying it are not considered (entirely) appropriate benchmarks to compare the language of 21st century secondary school EFL textbooks to (see also 6.5), then the present methodological framework is, in many ways, both considerably more robust and easier to implement than Biber's original method. For instance, using PCA rather than EFA as the underlying dimensionality-reduction method means that the largely arbitrary decision as to how many dimensions to extract can be linguistically and/or pragmatically motivated without fear of influencing the results of the entire model (see 7.2.5). In addition, not only does doing away with any thresholds to calculate dimension scores make theoretical sense (see 7.2.7), it also means that the output of the standard PCA functions offered in most statistical software can be interpreted without any additional manipulations. Finally, many statistical packages for PCA (including many open-source packages, see 7.2.10 and code in *Online Appendix 7.2*) also include multi-dimensional plotting functions, which means that visualising the results of PCA-based MDAs across several dimensions is comparatively easy. As we
have seen, visualisation is crucial to identifying internal patterns of variation (see
7.2.8 and Neumann & Evert 2021).

On the whole, the extensive use of visualisation has also increased the interpretability
of the results. Some may argue that interpreting the feature loadings of the resulting
models is more complex given that the frequencies entered in the PCAs represent
signed logged-transformed standardised frequencies that were normalised to different
baselines (see 7.2.4). However, the counts entered in the traditional MDA framework
are not immediately obvious either: they represent standardised z-scores. Moreover,
the linguistic motivations for opting for different normalisation baselines are
considerably stronger than any interpretability arguments – especially given that the
alternative (i.e., using word-based baselines) is certain to lead to genuine
interpretation issues. In 7.2.4, we saw that, for example, when the relative frequencies
of features such as contractions, negation and present tense per 1,000 words all
contribute to one pole of a dimension, whilst the frequencies of nouns and prepositions
per 1,000 words contribute to the opposite end, there is a risk that the dimension in
question represents nothing more than the proportion of verbs to nouns. In other
words, relying on frequencies normalised with a word-based baseline adds a
considerable amount of uncontrolled variation to the relative frequencies entered in
the analysis. This, in turn, can lead to difficulties in successfully conducting
replications on new data that support the original conclusions of such studies (Wallis
2020: 74). By contrast, various tests have shown that the two models of Textbook
English presented in this chapter are replicable on different subsets of the data which
allows us to be relatively confident about their robustness. The potential pedagogical
implications of these models, in combination with the cumulative understanding of
Textbook English gained in the previous analysis chapters, are outlined in the
following concluding chapter.
# 8 General discussion and implications

*Language cannot be invented, it can only be captured.*

❖ John McH. Sinclair (1997: 31)

This concluding chapter brings together the findings of the four analysis chapters (Ch. 4–7) and, in doing so, 8.1 attempts to answer the four sets of overarching research questions formulated in 3.2.1. In light of these findings, 8.2 considers the practical, pedagogical implications of the present study. First, 8.2.1 presents various ways to improve the representations of conversational English in ELT materials. Next, 8.2.2 outlines recommendations to improve the quality of the informative texts presented in these materials. This is followed by a section explaining how “bring[ing] textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language into closer correspondence with actual English” (Mindt 1996: 247) necessitates a register approach to ELT. This approach is explained in 8.2.3. Its practical consequences are broken down into implications for teacher training (8.2.4) and the design of EFL textbooks and other ELT materials (8.2.5). In spite of its pedagogically valuable results, the present study is clearly not without its limitations. These, together with methodological implications for future textbook language research, are discussed in 8.3. To conclude, future research avenues are outlined in 8.4 before summarising this study’s main take-home messages in 8.5.

## 8.1 Summary and conclusions

The present study set out to describe the language that secondary school pupils in France, Germany and Spain are exposed to via their textbooks. As explained in Chapter 1, textbooks constitute one of the major, if not the most important, vector of English language input that EFL learners encounter in the first four to five years of their secondary schooling. Although it is popular knowledge that the language portrayed in EFL textbooks somehow “feels” different to the kinds of English used outside the classroom, this study is the first to attempt to model the nature of these linguistic peculiarities across different registers and proficiency levels by accounting for many different linguistic features and their co-occurrences.

The literature review carried out in Chapter 2 showed that, to date, the representations of a broad range of individual linguistic features have been examined in EFL/ESL textbooks. In 2.1 some of these studies were described as ‘intra-textbook analyses’ because they seek to explore and describe the language of EFL textbooks without relying on any comparison benchmarks. By contrast, comparative textbook
language analyses draw on reference corpora or corpus-based lists to infer what is
different or special about the language of textbooks. In this context, two main issues
were identified. First, explorations of how individual lexico-grammatical features are
represented in EFL textbooks had, up until now, failed to account for potential
interactions between these features and, second, Textbook English studies had largely
ignored the fact that textbooks represent a range of different registers. Thus, much
textbook language research had (often implicitly) assumed that Textbook English
constitutes a homogenous variety of English with no (systematic) sources of internal
variation. The present study has shown, across all four analysis chapters, that this
assumption is not justified. By far the largest source of intra-textbook linguistic
variation was observed across the different modes and registers represented in the
textbooks of the TEC. In addition, textbook proficiency levels were also found to be
associated with significant patterns of intra-textbook variation. By contrast, no major
patterns of linguistic variation could be attributed to the idiosyncrasies of groups of
textbook authors and/or editorial policies.

The first analysis chapter (Chapter 4) presented an extended conceptual replication
of Römer (2005: Ch. 5 and 6), in which representations of the progressive in the
spoken-like components of two series of EFL textbooks used at lower secondary level
in Germany were compared to a corpus of spoken British English. Römer’s (2005: Ch.
5–6) analyses were replicated using data from the Conversation subcorpus of the
TEC, which includes more recent versions of the same textbook series that comprised
Römer’s textbook dialogue corpus (see 4.1.2). Many of the trends observed in the
original study were found to be still significant in the dialogues of contemporary
secondary school EFL textbooks. For instance, past-tense progressives, progressives
with contracted auxiliary verb forms and negated progressives remain under-
represented in many contemporary textbook dialogues. The replication carried out in
Chapter 4 can be said to be ‘extended’ for three reasons. First, it examines the
progressive in the language of EFL textbooks used in France and Spain, as well as
Germany. Second, in addition to conversation, Chapter 4 also reports on morpho-
syntactic analyses of the progressive in a second register of school EFL textbooks,
namely: fiction. Third, the original study was expanded to include in-depth lexical
and semantic analyses of the verb lemmas associated with the progressive in both
Textbook Conversation and Textbook Fiction, thus adopting a truly lexico-
grammatical approach to the study of the progressive (see 4.3.4). This was achieved
using collostructional (see 4.2.3) and correspondence analyses (4.2.4). The additional
comparison of representations of the progressive in Textbook Fiction with those found
in the reference Youth Fiction corpus indicated that many of the reported linguistic
peculiarities concerning the use of the progressive in Textbook English are actually
only true of representations of spoken, conversational English in textbooks. However,
some differences were observed in Fiction, too – for instance, concerning the functional
use of the progressive in ‘framing’ contexts (see 4.3.3.5).
Lexico-grammatical/phraseological analyses were also at the heart of the second case-study chapter, Chapter 5, which attempted to “make sense of MAKE” in the same two registers of school EFL textbooks as in Chapter 4: Conversation and Fiction. In many ways, the use of MAKE in these two subcorpora of the TEC was found to be very comparable to how MAKE is used in the reference Spoken BNC2014 and Youth Fiction corpora. However, Chapter 5 also pointed to some disconcerting misrepresentations of the use of MAKE in the textbooks of the TEC. In particular, the representations of phrasal verbs (e.g., MAKE *out* in the sense of PERCEIVE, MAKE *sth. up* in the sense of INVENT) and collocations pertaining to the semantic field of discourse and communication (e.g., MAKE *a(n) argument/assumption/complaint/point*) were found to be particularly weak.

Having explored two sets of specific lexico-grammatical features in two contrasting textbook registers in these two case-study chapters, Chapter 6 paved the way for a multi-feature description of Textbook English. To this end, the texts of the Conversation, Fiction, Informative, Instructional, Personal correspondence and Poetry & rhyme subcorpora of the TEC (see 3.3.1.4) were first mapped onto the six dimensions of variation that constitute Biber's (1988) multi-feature/dimensional model of General Spoken and Written English. The results reported in Chapter 6 make clear that register differences must be accounted for when describing and/or evaluating the language of school EFL textbooks. On Biber's (1988) Dimension 1, which accounts for the most variance across the texts of the TEC, register was shown to explain by far the largest proportion of the variance observed in dimension scores (63%). By contrast, textbook series accounted for just 5% of the variance. On this same dimension, the different proficiency levels of the textbooks only explained 2% of variance; however, this percentage was found to be considerably higher on some of the other dimensions of Biber's (1988) model. Significant interactions between specific registers and target learner proficiency levels were also observed. These were found to be particularly relevant in the description of Textbook Fiction: on average, the narrative texts of the TEC are very different to those found in real novels; yet these differences are almost entirely driven by proficiency level effects caused by beginner textbooks relying on present-tense narration in the units preceding those introducing the past tense (see 6.3.2.2 and 7.3.2.2).

In spite of many interesting and pedagogically relevant observations, Chapter 6 concluded that not all of Biber's (1988) dimensions can contribute to meaningfully describing the language of secondary school EFL textbooks. Biber's (1988) Dimensions 4, 5 and 6, in particular, were shown to be of very limited use because they are made up of just a handful of features, which are rare in general English and even rarer in Textbook English. Further methodological issues were identified both in the selection of linguistic features that Biber's (1988) model relies on and their operationalisations. Some of the features and feature operationalisations were shown
to be unsuitable for the present data (e.g., nominalisations, stranded prepositions, discourse markers, etc.) (see 6.3.2.1). In some cases, this was due to operationalisations relying on punctuation marks – which, aside from question marks, are entirely absent from the transcripts of the Spoken BNC2014 corpus (see 3.3.2.1).<fnref n="60" /> Other issues discussed in 6.5 concern the statistical methods and parameters that the traditional MDA framework relies on.

As a result of the findings of Chapter 6, suggested improvements to the MDA framework were presented in the first half of Chapter 7 (7.2) and implemented in the second half (7.3). The first PCA conducted as part of this improved MDA framework captures intra-textbook variation on four dimensions. It models Textbook English as a variety of English that, like all regional and domain-specific varieties of English, varies considerably across different registers. Two main dimensions of register variation were identified: the first ('Overt instructions and explanations', see 7.3.1.1) clearly delineates instructional texts and instructions from the rest of the registers featured in secondary school textbooks, whilst the second ('Involved vs. Informational Production', see 7.3.1.2) draws a continuum between involved, interactional speech and informational written language with textbook dialogues at the top of the scale and informative texts at the bottom. As such, this second dimension is very reminiscent of Biber's (1988) Dimension 1 (see 6.1.1). A third dimension of linguistic variation ('Present/factual vs. Past/speculative', see 7.3.1.3) explains some differences between the fictional texts of the TEC and the remaining text registers, whilst a fourth dimension ('Clausal complexity', see 7.3.1.4) highlights further discrepancies between Textbook Conversation and the Spoken BNC2014, though these two dimensions account for considerably less variance than the first two.

In 7.3.2, a second PCA was conducted – this time with the aim of modelling three major registers of Textbook English in relation to the three corresponding target learner language reference corpora: the Spoken BNC2014 (3.3.2.1), Info Teens (3.3.2.2) and Youth Fiction (3.3.2.3). Here, too, the results confirm the observations made in the two case-study chapters (Chapters 4 and 5) and the one applying additive MDA (Chapter 6): register differences within textbooks do exist but are considerably less pronounced than in ‘real-life’ English. Similarities and differences between these three textbook registers and comparable ‘real-life’ registers were modelled on four dimensions of linguistic variation.

Both Chapters 6 and 7 have demonstrated that MDA is highly suitable for describing Textbook English and, in combination with mixed effects linear models, an effective way of disentangling the various sources of variation and their interactions within

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Note that although it is true that punctuation marks were added at utterance boundaries for the novel MDAs carried out with the MFTE in Chapter 7, they only served to boost the accuracy of the underlying part-of-speech tagging process (see 3.3.2.1).</footnote>
Textbook English. In 7.2.10, it was noted that some have raised concerns that, as a methodology, MDA has replicability issues. Given that the revised MDA framework presented and applied in Chapter 7 is relatively novel, it was all the more important to ensure that the results it yielded were robust. This was achieved by successfully running replications of both models presented in Chapter 7 on various subsets of the data (see 7.4).

<figure><img src="image_92.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 86: Projection of texts on PC1 and PC2 from a random 2/3 split-data analysis of the three subcorpora of the TEC and the three reference corpora</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_93.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 87: Projection of texts on PC3 and PC4 from a random 2/3 split-data analysis of the three subcorpora of the TEC and the three reference corpora</figcaption></figure>
Fig. 86 and 87 illustrate the robustness of the results. Though they may, at first sight, appear identical to Fig. 74 and 76, they, in fact, visualise the results of a model computed on the basis of a random subset of two-thirds of the data (see Online Appendix 7.7). The trends discussed in 7.3.2 are clearly identifiable on both these figures. In light of the success of these replicability and robustness tests, the following section provides answers to the four overarching research questions formulated in 3.2.1.

## 1. How homogenous is Textbook English as a variety of English? Which factors mediate intra-textbook linguistic variation?

The results of the four analysis chapters converge to confirm that the language of school EFL textbooks cannot be conceptualised as a homogenous variety of English. The results of the PCA-based model of intra-textbook variation in 7.3.1, in particular, showed that both register and textbook proficiency level effects are drivers of intra-textbook linguistic variation; yet register accounts for considerably more of this variation. Furthermore, many significant interactions between different registers and textbook proficiency levels were observed and quantified.

## 2. To what extent are French, German and Spanish secondary school pupils confronted with varying English input via their textbooks?

Given that the textbooks examined as part of this project are designed for and/or used in very different educational contexts, it was hypothesised that there would be noticeable differences in the linguistic nature of the language input that students learning English in France, Spain and Germany are exposed to via their textbooks. However, throughout the four analysis chapters, no systematic differences could be discerned between the language of textbooks used in France, Germany and Spain (though the French textbook series were found to deliver substantially less language input, see 7.4). Indeed, even when comparing the nine textbook series of the TEC, very little of the observed intra-textbook linguistic variation could be attributed to the authors or editorial policies of individual textbook series. Thus, in answer to this second overarching research question, we can conclude that the nature of the language that French, German and Spanish secondary school pupils are confronted with via their textbooks is, in fact, remarkably similar, in spite of different academic traditions, school systems and textbook publishing traditions. Possible reasons for this will be discussed in the following sections.
### 3. To what extent is the language of current EFL textbooks used in secondary schools in France, Germany and Spain representative of ‘real-life’ English as used by native/proficient English speakers in similar communicative situations? To what extent are some registers more faithfully represented than others?

Except for the rare few narrative texts in beginner textbooks which rely on present-tense narration and understandably feature very limited vocabulary, all of the results converge to show that fiction is the most faithfully represented register in school EFL textbooks. This is demonstrated by the large overlaps between the Textbook Fiction and the Youth Fiction ellipses on most projections of texts (see, e.g., Fig. 86 and 87 in this chapter). Large overlaps can also be seen in the Informative register. By contrast, on these multi-dimensional projections of texts, only a small proportion of the Textbook Conversation texts are situated within the ellipses of the Spoken BNC2014 – thus pointing to major differences between natural speech and textbook representations thereof. The results of the two case-study chapters also confirm these trends. Section 8.2.1 is devoted to the potential implications of inauthentic representations of conversational English in pedagogical materials.

### 4a. Which (clusters of) lexico-grammatical features are characteristic of Textbook English?

The clusters of lexico-grammatical features that characterise the various registers of Textbook English were discussed at length in the preceding four analysis chapters. To summarise, across different registers, the linguistic peculiarities of Textbook English are perhaps best illustrated in the projection of texts on the first and second dimensions of the second PCA-based model conducted in 7.3.2 (see Fig. 74). Whilst it shows that many Conversation, Fiction and Informative texts featured in school EFL textbooks are, at least on these two dimensions of linguistic variation, very akin to or even practically undistinguishable from situationally similar real-life texts, the ellipses of the TEC registers are nonetheless noticeably shifted towards the middle of the plot as compared to those of the corresponding reference corpora (see Fig. 74). A further gap between textbook and non-textbook language was observed on the third, ‘Pedagogically adapted vs. Natural’, dimension that emerged from the second PCA-based model of Textbook English: the texts of the TEC tend to be shifted towards the positive end of this dimension (see Fig. 87). In other words, the most prototypical exemplar texts of Textbook English are likely to be located around zero on the ‘Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational’ and ‘Narrative vs. Non-narrative’ dimensions and towards the ‘adapted’ end of the ‘Pedagogically adapted vs. Natural’ dimension. Excerpts (244)–(246) are examples of such texts and can thus be said to be “prototypically textbook-like”. Although (244) corresponds to an informative text, (245) represents fiction, and (246) a conversational interview, taken
from three different textbook series, they are stylistically remarkably similar. They share many linguistic features: an abundance of nominal phrases, high lexical density, high relative frequencies of *yes/no* and WH-questions, a strong preference for the modal *can* over other modal verbs and BE as a main verb over other lexical verbs, to mention but a few. All in all, the texts are written in an informal style that, in many ways, appears to emulate some aspects of casual conversation yet, as seen in all the comparisons with the Spoken BNC2014 in Chapters 4–6, lacks many of the defining features of natural, spontaneous conversation.

Excerpt (244) is a representative example of a typical textbook dialogue in that, whilst it attempts to model some natural disfluencies in the form of hesitations and the occasional paralinguistic filler or discourse marker (*mmm, well, yes*), it remains first and foremost a vehicle for vocabulary learning. Hence, the dialogue is built around words, phrases and idioms that are to be acquired by the learners. In excerpt (244), these include *playground, kangaroo, palm tree, suit sb. down to the ground, kookaburra, sailing boat, bush, rollers*, etc. In such texts, the textbook authors clearly prioritise the placement of these vocabulary items over the naturalness of the dialogue. This is not to say that there is no valid pedagogical justification to do so. Potential issues only arise if learners are expected to acquire the necessary linguistic and pragmatic competences to interact with others in spontaneous conversation solely on the basis of such, highly unnatural, models of spoken interaction (more on this in 8.2.1).

(244) Now, what about you, Charlene? What it is like to live here?
Well, it's really great! We have a vast garden. And it's a great
playground for Joey, our two-year-old kangaroo. The garden's full of
palm trees and exotic plants. There's kookaburras and other birds that
sing all day long. It's really wonderful! Our house is typically
Australian, which suits me down to the ground. And the view from the
front porch is fabulous! We can see sailing boats everywhere in the
summer.
Now, tell us about your everyday life. What do you do here in Sydney?
On Sundays, we usually go walking in the bush with the whole family. And
we also go shopping at the Rocks or on Circular Quay. And if we've got
time, we go for a walk in Hyde Park.
Charlene?
We often go on visits to the Aquarium, Darling Harbour and Taronga Zoo
with friends. We go to Bondi beach. Mmm... there's great rollers there
for surfing. I love going to the beach after school when it's hot, in
January... Yes... And all the family goes jogging every morning, even
me... by the sea and, well, it's just fantastic to be out, out in the
good weather. It's not so cold around here. <TEC: New Bridges 2<sup>de</sup>>

By contrast, and although it is cast as an informative text in the form of a short
article, text (245) is much more spoken-like than the majority of informative texts
found in the Info Teens corpus: it features rhetorical questions, many second-person
references and a number of discourse markers typical of speech (e.g., *well*).
(245) The British soap opera Coronation Street started in 1960 and is still on TV today. Other popular soaps are Neighbours, Emmerdale and EastEnders. All the soaps try to be realistic about life with its happy times, its problems and some violence. The name "soap opera", or just "soap", goes back to radio dramas in the 1930s – the commercials were for housewives, and they advertised soap, and other cleaning products. Want to be a star? Want to be discovered? Not so fast! Before you can get anywhere, the programme has to "cast" you first. Have you ever been invited to do a casting? You haven't? Well, TEENBUZZ tells you all about it. Matt Stirling from EastEnders can give you a few tips, too. First, you talk to an agent and give him or her your photo. Then one day the agent is phoned by a Casting Director who is looking for a special character for a soap. She tells the agent who she needs. Let's call him "justin". So the agent looks through his files and finds a photo of – you! Your photo is sent to the Casting Director, who looks at hundreds of photos for the right "justin". She likes your face! <TEC: Green Line 3>

Excerpt (246) is a representative example of a fictional text from a textbook targeted at learners in their second year of English classes at secondary school. It is narrated in the present tense and features more contracted verbs and occurrences of BE as a main verb per finite verb phrase than the average novel targeted at teenagers and young adults. It would be inappropriate to conclude that it is “unnatural” or “inauthentic” simply by virtue of being situated among the clusters of “prototypically textbook-like” texts on Fig. 74 and Fig. 87. The fact that such texts are amongst the most stereotypically “textbook-like” texts located in the middle of Fig. 86 and 87 and towards the positive end of Dimension 3 (see Fig. 76) merely points to the narrative nature of prototypical textbook texts, regardless of the register they intend to portray, as demonstrated in (244) and (245).

(246) "There are good ideas and bad ideas," thinks Ruby. "And this is a bad idea." On Saturdays, Ruby usually reads or paints at home. She often goes out and takes unusual photos of things in her town. Sometimes she even makes short films and uploads them onto her website. But today, on this cold, sunny Saturday in April, Ruby is running up a mountain. OK, it's a very small mountain. But Ruby doesn't like mountains. And she hates running. Ruby and her friends are raising money for a charity. They want to help schools in Africa buy new computers. And yes, Ruby knows it's a good idea to raise money for charity. But running? Up a mountain? That is simply terrible. Ruby stops, closes her eyes and holds her head in her hands. She feels terrible. She is out of breath, her chest is burning and her legs hurt. "Next time, ... next time I can sell a picture... or clean cars... give away all my money... anything! But I'm never, never doing this again!" She sits down on a rock. The air is cold and her breath forms small white clouds. The sun is shining brightly in a clear blue sky. <TEC: Achievers A2>
4b. To what extent are these defining features stable across entire textbook series? To what extent are some specific to certain proficiency levels?

The present study has made clear that many, but not by any means all, linguistic features that are highly typical of Textbook English are stable across entire textbook series – in other words, across the different proficiency levels represented in the TEC. However, proficiency level effects were also found to interact with how linguistically similar the Conversation, Fiction and Informative texts featured in secondary school EFL textbooks are to situationally similar texts that students are likely to engage with outside the classroom.

Given the obvious relationship between the language of foreign language textbooks and the targeted proficiency level of the learners, it is not surprising that we find such proficiency level effects on many of the extracted dimensions of variation in Textbook English. The strongest of these interactions were observed in the Fiction register, followed by Informative texts and, lastly, Conversation. Curiously, however, the proficiency level trends observed in the Conversation subcorpus of the TEC follow, on almost all the dimensions of variation scrutinised, the opposite direction to what common sense would have predicted: Conversation texts from the most advanced textbooks of the TEC are, on average, the ones that are most different to the transcripts of the Spoken BNC2014. Some of the potential pedagogical implications of this and the other key findings summarised above are discussed in the following section.

## 8.2 Pedagogical implications and recommendations

Before beginning to reflect on the potential pedagogical implications of the present study, it is important to remember that all of the analyses presented in this thesis are, by nature, descriptive and exploratory. The present study did not attempt to investigate the *effectiveness* of Textbook English, in other words the extent to which prototypically textbook-like language may or may not support EFL learners in their English acquisition processes. It merely attempted to provide a comprehensive description of the language of lower secondary school textbooks used in France, Germany and Spain and, in doing so, to raise awareness of what constitutes Textbook English.

In terms of pedagogical implications, it should be stressed that the proficiency level effects that were found to mediate linguistic variation within Textbook English suggest that some of the identified specific characteristics of Textbook English are pedagogically well-founded, or, at the very least, intended by the textbook authors and editors. Indeed, it certainly would not make pedagogical sense to expose learners to the same kind of language in their first year of learning English as in their fifth.
At the same time, this study has demonstrated that, in many ways, Textbook English does represent a distinct variety of English.

When Segermann (2000: 339) asserted that foreign language textbook texts represent a text type “sui generis”, she probably had the kind of texts situated in the middle of Fig. 74 in mind, e.g., (244)–(246). Indeed, excerpts (244)–(246) epitomise the type of contrived texts which have been meticulously crafted by textbook authors in order to fulfil very specific pedagogical criteria. Constraints on textbook authors are multiple. In many cases, these texts are largely determined by the lexis and grammar of the stringent learning progressions that are enshrined in the textbooks’ tables of contents and which are, in turn, devised on the basis of the curriculum and syllabus in force (see, among others, Burton 2019; Gießing 2004: 84; Quetz 1999: 16–17; Segermann 2000: 339). It is not uncommon for textbook authors and teachers to believe that this particular type of contrived text is – at least in the first few years of language learning – indispensable because learners are only to be exposed to “controllable portions” of language (Segermann 2000; see also Thornbury’s [2000] infamous “grammar McNuggets”).

This belief can be traced back to Pienemann’s (1984) teachability hypothesis that postulates that, when acquiring new morpho-syntactic structures, L2 learners follow a natural developmental sequence which means that they can only acquire a new structure once they have mastered the structures that precede it in this developmental sequence (see also Krashen 1982; 1985 on the related notion of “comprehensible input”). The hypothesis of universal developmental sequences has been, to some extent, confirmed in empirical studies (e.g., Ellis 1989; Spada & Lightbown 1999). What has been refuted, however, is the accompanying hypothesis that teaching a structure for which learners are not yet “developmentally ready” will not only fail to result in learning, but also have a detrimental effect on learning outcomes (e.g., Larsen-Freeman 2006; 2018; Spada & Lightbown 1999; Ur 2011: 513). Yet, this underlying belief that learning a foreign language is a linear process and that a text is only accessible to learners if they are already familiar with every aspect of its lexis and grammar remains widespread (see, e.g., Phakiti & Plonsky 2018).

Given that these pedagogically contrived texts (and, again, it is worth reiterating that these do not, by any means, represent *all* textbook texts!) are created, first and foremost, to meet very restrictive criteria, they cannot be expected to “sound natural” or to be perceived by learners as such:

> Von ihr [dieser Textsorte *sui generis*] zu verlangen, dass sie von einem Schüler wie ein normaler Text rezipiert wird (mit normaler Erwartungshaltung, Eigeninteresse und entsprechender Bereitschaft zur selbsttätigen Sinngebung), hieße, ihre Funktion zu verkennen und die Quadratur des Kreises zu verlangen. [To expect that it [this kind of textbook text *sui generis*] be received by pupils as a normal text (with normal expectations,
intrinsic interest and hence the willingness to make sense of it by themselves) would be to misjudge its function and to demand the squaring of the circle.] (Segermann 2000: n.p.).

Indeed, if textbook dialogues are often the butt of Brian is in the kitchen-type jokes (see Chapter 1), it is precisely because learners (and their parents) are well aware that many of these dialogues are anything but natural-sounding, as demonstrated in the following extract from a focus group interview conducted with secondary school pupils in Germany:

M: (...) Wenn irgendwie so ne englische Sendung ist im Fernsehen, da versteht man nicht jedes Wort, weil die umgangssprachlich reden und wir lernen in der Schule ja ein anderes Englisch. Wir lernen eher so das Englisch, äh, so

M: normales Schulenglisch

M: normal

M: Schulenglisch

M: Schulenglisch, und das ist anderes Englisch was die reden. Das ist umgangssprachlich, die haben andere Wörter

M: da ist das auch viel schneller, unverständlicher

[M: (...) When, like, in an English programme on TV, you don't understand every word, because they use colloquial language and in school we learn a different English. We kind of learn the English, ahm, like

M: normal school English

M: normal

M: school English

M: school English, and this is different from the one they use. It's colloquial, they use different words

M: it's a lot faster, and not so easy to understand] (Grau 2009: 170, 173; translation Grau)

In German, the widely-used term *Schulenglisch* [school English] is mostly used in a pejorative sense to describe “a form of English that marks its users as having acquired the language in school” (Grau 2009: 170). It is considered different from the English that is actually used by competent English speakers. In the following extract of an interview, a Spanish L1 English L2 speaker refers to the same phenomenon as *inglés de libro* [(text)book English]:

Yo cuando llegué aquí [en Inglaterra] por primera vez es que hablaba un inglés de libro y me sentía fatal. O sea, no tenía esos recursos de conversación más informal, más de registro. Pues sí, con amigos, con familia. Me faltaba ese vocabulario y digo llevo años estudiando inglés y era muy artificial. [As for me, when I arrived here [in England] for the first time, I spoke textbook English and I felt awful. Like, I didn't have those resources for more informal conversation, [that are more appropriate] for that register. Well, that is, with friends, with family. I lacked that vocabulary and, I mean, I'd been studying English for years and it was so fake.] (Pérez-Paredes & Abad forthcoming)

Here, too, textbook-based EFL instruction is seen as inadequate in terms of teaching spoken communicative skills. Indeed, the layperson's perception that representations of spoken English in EFL textbooks are particularly inauthentic has been confirmed in the present study. In both case-study chapters and on all dimensions of linguistic variation examined in the two MDA chapters, Textbook Conversation was
consistently found to be the least natural-sounding of textbook registers. This is why, in turning to the practical implications of the present study, the following section begins with the potential pedagogical implications of these unnatural representations of spoken English in secondary school EFL textbooks. Having pointed to what makes these dialogues potentially problematic, it goes on to suggest solutions to improve the quality of EFL materials intended to model conversational English.

### 8.2.1 Improving representations of conversational English

Chapters 6 and 7 showed that by far the greatest gap between Textbook English and natural English that learners are expected to encounter outside the EFL classroom is found in the Conversation register. To begin, however, it is worth highlighting that not all textbook dialogues were found to be strikingly different from naturally occurring conversation. Excerpt (247), for instance, is situated within the ellipses of the Spoken BNC2014 on all projections of texts visualised in Chapter 7. This is because, among other factors, it features relatively high frequencies of fillers and interjections, discourse markers, the modal *could*, contracted verbs, negation, and an abundance of first and second-person references.

>(247)<br/>Amy: Hi, Nick.<br/>Nick: Hi, Amy. Amy, is this your backpack on the floor?<br/>Amy: That's right.<br/>Nick: Well, could you perhaps put it somewhere else? It's kind of in the way.<br/>Amy: No, it's not. It's where I always leave it.<br/>Nick: Yes, I know you always leave it there. And it's always in the way.<br/>This is a pretty small place, Amy. So perhaps just for once you could put your backpack somewhere where it isn't in the way, hmm?<br/>Amy: You don't own this place, Nick. So don't try and tell me what to do. I came in early to get some things done. I put my backpack on the floor. You deal with it! <TEC: English in Mind 4>

Thus, it would be a grossly misleading simplification but to claim that all textbook dialogues are poor representations of spontaneous spoken language. That said, the majority of the texts of the Textbook Conversation subcorpus did score much lower than (247) and the texts of the Spoken BNC2014 on both Biber's (1988) 'Involved vs. Informational Production' dimension (see 6.3.2) and the functionally very similar 'Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational' dimension that emerged from the second PCA-based model in 7.3.2. Most worryingly from a pedagogical point of view, the statistical analyses of the models in Chapters 6 and 7 showed that the dialogues of the most advanced textbooks of the TEC are, on average, the least representative of natural conversation (see 6.4 and 7.3.2.1).

Depending on the learning objectives associated with these texts, sound pedagogical reasons may well justify the unnaturalness of some of these artificial dialogues. If a textbook dialogue's primary aim is to teach a pre-defined list of nouns, it may make
sense to construct the text around these nouns. If, however, the primary purpose of
these texts is to develop learners' oral competences (i.e., their receptive and/or
productive skills), then such low scores on oral–literate dimensions of variation are a
cause for concern. Excerpt (248), for example, is an extract of a textbook dialogue for
the fifth year of secondary EFL instruction that is situated closer to the
edited/informational end of the 'Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational'
dimension than any of the conversation transcripts of the Spoken BNC2014. In fact,
it is linguistically far removed from natural conversation on all dimensions of variation
explored in the present thesis. This is the result of its considerably higher type/token
ratio and longer average word length than most real-life conversations, as well as the
fact that it features many complex nominal phrases, which, in turn, lead to high
relative frequencies of prepositions and attributive adjectives.

(248)

Journalist: This is Sally Gordon here in Leicester Square, London. I'm right in the middle of sports fans. Excuse me, Sir. Who is your favourite sports hero?

Dwayne: Definitely, Chris Hoy, the British track cyclist - won two gold medals. He represents strength and courage, he never gave up.

Journalist: What about you? Who is the best representative of your country?

Donna: Kobe Bryant for sure. I'm American and we are very patriotic when it comes to sport. He has shown the world we remain the dominant leaders in basketball, no doubt. And Michael Phelps of course.

Journalist: Why?

Donna: Why? He has just won four golds and two silver medals and he is a record holder. The dream came true. Incredible. That's why he is nicknamed "the Baltimore Bullet". He symbolises determination, generosity, hope... great values. You see, he's a role model! He will be remembered forever. <TEC: New Mission 2<sup>de</sup>>

Hence, whilst textbook dialogues such as (247) expose learners to interactional,
genuinely conversation-like language that they are likely to encounter outside the
classroom, texts such as (248) cannot be considered to be realistic models for EFL
learners to acquire spontaneous spoken language comprehension and/or production
skills. As mentioned above, such texts can be argued to serve other pedagogical
purposes, e.g., the high lexical diversity of excerpt (248) may be specifically aimed at
increasing learners' receptive vocabulary range by introducing learners to many nouns
from a single semantic field (e.g., *strength*, *courage*, *determination*, *generosity*, *hope*,
etc.).

Given that such dialogues represent the norm rather than the exception in secondary
school EFL textbooks, textbook authors and teachers ought to carefully consider the
primary pedagogical purpose of such highly unnatural-sounding dialogues. If they are
destined to model and enhance learners' conversational skills, they should consider
replacing them with authentic materials. If no suitable authentic materials can be
sourced, corpus data or the results of corpus-based studies may be used to revise
them. The following paragraphs illustrate these various options on the basis of excerpt (248).

Given the now widespread availability of corpora and corpus tools, there is no longer a need for textbook authors to systematically craft their textbook dialogues from scratch (for a list of freely available English corpora and corpus tools, see Le Foll 2021c: Appendix). Of course, this is not to suggest that the transcripts of spoken corpora such as the Spoken BNC2014 should be printed *verbatim*, as in (249), in coursebooks. However, if learners are to be expected to develop real-life conversational skills, the kind of natural interaction that is captured in such transcripts ought to be featured in at least some of the audio-visual materials that accompany EFL coursebooks. For instance, in a conversation about meeting a sports hero from the Spoken BNC2014, excerpt (249) demonstrates how speakers frequently interrupt each other, ask for clarification when things are unclear (e.g., *who is who is it?*) and manifest their interest in the conversation with laughter, other paralinguistic sounds and various interjections (e.g., *yeah*, *uhu*, *mm*, *oh cool*).

(249) I met my hero didn't I? I text you remember?
yeh
who did you meet?
Hans no way Rey
you were[?]
who is who is it?
he's talking about a famous mountain climber
famous bike rider
oh okay
he's astonishing I went well I wasn't very old I think maybe I was
employed to drive maybe I was just starting to drive
uhu
and there was like a big there used to be a big like erm biking event in
<anon type="place"/>
mm
and he was in like a a show and the things he did honestly cos bikes
were crap in those days but he was
<unclear/>
amazing and he had the stereo going in the background and he like had
these picnic tables and he was like hopping onto them and jumping
between them
oh cool
yeah he had all quite
<vocal desc="laugh"/>
people would lie on the floor and he was like jumping over them and he'd
get his front wheel and then he'd put the front wheel onto there and
<unclear/> it was <trunc>am</trunc> a show like <BNC214: SBKN>

As demonstrated by the complex turn structure in (249), faithfully scripting such dialogues is no mean feat. For “cleaner”, less “chaotic”, yet linguistically accurate representations of spoken language (as empirically demonstrated by, e.g., Quaglio 2009; see also Werner 2021 on the relationships between the language of scripted
telecinematic language and face-to-face conversation), textbook authors and teachers
may want to turn to film and TV series for more readily usable materials. Indeed,
screenwriters are professionals in imitating natural speech. Often such materials can
relatively easily be adapted for classroom use. Excerpt (250), for instance, was sourced
from the freely accessible TV Movie Corpus hosted on the online corpus platform
english-corpora.org (Davies 2019) by searching for the target collocation *gold MEDAL*<fnref n="61" />
featured in the original textbook dialogue (248). It could be used with beginner
learners of English without any modification.

(250)

Hey, Smoochie, come here.
I have something pretty special to show you. Come here, bub, do you want
to see a video of one of the best gymnasts in the entire world? It's not
just me saying that. She won an actual **gold medal**. Her name is Simone
Biles, that's her right there.
Oh, Simone Biles, she is amazing.
Right? Here, watch this. [Crowd_Noises-On_Laptop]
Wow, she is very flexible.
[...]
There we go, look at this, look at this.
Whoa!
Whoo! Whoo, she's so good, did you like that?
It was really good.
I know, right? <TV Movie Corpus: I'm Sorry (2017)>

In staying with the topic covered in textbook excerpt (248) representing unnatural
conversational English, a quick query for the phrase *sports HERO* in the TV/MOVIES
subcorpus of the *Corpus of Contemporary American English* (COCA; also available
on english-corpora.org; Davies 2010) returned several snippets of conversation which
could also be integrated in the EFL classroom with hardly any need to “doctor the
text”. One of these is re-printed below:

(251)

**The point is**, we're both trying to teach you the same thing, to be a winner, not a Rosie Ruiz.
A Rosie Who-now?
Okay, Goldfarb.
One last lesson before I go... That lesson was about Rosie Ruiz, a world-class runner in the ' 80s, famous for winning the Boston Marathon by **taking the subway**. [...]
This woman cheated to win the Boston Marathon?
And no one noticed?
Nope. Everybody **was too caught up in the excitement** that an unfit woman who knew nothing about the sport didn't even **break a sweat** while **shattering a world record**.
Wow. That is so wrong.
Yeah.
She **took the subway**?
The subway!

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ On english-corpora.org, words can be capitalised to search for all forms of a lemma (i.e., here *medal* and *medals*).</footnote>
Everyone has a **sports hero**, and Rosie Ruiz is mine.

Controversial, but okay.

That's why during the mile run, I'll jump into your car, and you can
drive me to the **finish line**?

Aw, kiddo. I... I can't help you.

Cause cheating is wrong?

No!

Cheating's that rush that **keeps me ticking**.

I can't help you 'cause I don't have a license.

<COCA: The Goldbergs (2019)>

At this stage, it is worth noting that drawing on conversational language from films and TV series would not necessarily lead to a lexico-grammatical impoverishment of the language input students are exposed to – on the contrary. Excerpt (251), for example, features a number of idiomatic collocations to which teachers would do well to draw learners’ attention, e.g., *take the subway, be caught up in the excitement, break a sweat, shatter a world record*, etc. It is worth noting that in contrast to the vocabulary conveyed in excerpt (248) which consists foremost of individual nouns, excerpt (251) features many high-frequency verb + noun collocations (see also Barlow 2003: 7). This is crucial as much research has shown that the acquisition of such patterns of co-occurrence (e.g., collocations, chunks, lexical bundles, etc.) is essential to developing both fluency and accuracy in a foreign language (see, among others, Altenberg & Granger 2001; Cowie 1998; Herbst 1996; Hoey 2005; Hunston & Francis 2000; Langacker 2001; Nesselhauf 2005). Following a usage-based L2 instruction paradigm (see 1.4), these patterns of co-occurrence are conceptualised as constructions. The comparison of excerpts (248) and (251) illustrates the scarcity of constructions in stereotypically textbook-like texts. This is highly problematic because, as eloquently put by Herbst (2016: 77):

> If “it’s constructions all the way down” (Goldberg 2006: 18) and language learning consists of the learning of constructions, then language teaching should consist of the teaching of constructions.

Unfortunately, however, the pervasiveness of constructions in language has yet to be
fully grasped by those involved in L2 teaching (Ellis, Römer & O'Donnell 2016; Pérez-
Paredes, Mark & O'Keeffe 2020; Tyler, Ortega & Uno 2018). In particular, excerpts
such as (248) suggest that textbook authors seemingly continue to be tasked with the
artificial insertion of countless individual nouns in textbook representations of
spontaneous, spoken English, e.g., in (248), *strength, courage, determination,
generosity, hope*, etc., at the detriment of frequent and idiomatic collocations.

Returning to example (251), it can also be hypothesised that, from a motivational
point of view, students are more likely to learn and remember the term *driving license*
if they first came across it in a text such as (251) in which there is a genuine
communicative need to understand that, here, *license* refers to *driving license* to make
sense of the conversation. More generally, it is fair to say that students are more
likely to be intrinsically motivated when asked to engage with materials that they,
themselves, recognise as “authentic” and “real” (Gilmore 2011). In advocating for the inclusion of corpus-informed spoken grammar in ELT, Carter & McCarthy (1996: 370) question whether deciding that learners need not be exposed to certain kinds of natural English might “not ignore a psychological reality in that all of us as language learners and teachers are intrigued by real discourse and by what native speakers do with it”. The authors go on to convincingly argue that only offering contrived, simplified models of English in ELT materials amounts to holding back information which ultimately disempowers learners. Given that a large body of (corpus) linguistic research has now demonstrated and extensively documented pedagogically relevant lexico-grammatical differences between different registers of English (e.g., Biber et al. 2021; Carter 2014; Carter & McCarthy 2017; Carter & McCarthy 2006b), continuing to offer learners models of conversational English that are evidently based on written norms is no longer tenable.

Although calls to rely more on authentic data and corpus tools in ELT materials design now go back two or more decades (e.g., Conrad 2000; McEnery & Xiao 2011; Mindt 1996; Prowse 1998; Römer 2004a; 2006a; Sinclair 1991; 2004, to mention but a few), up until recently, textbook authors could be forgiven for lacking the skills and knowledge to source and/or adapt authentic materials. Today, however, the availability of a wealth of suitable online resources and ease of use of free corpus tools (to mention but a few: cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/, corpora.lancs.ac.uk/bnclab/, english-corpora.org, yohasebe.com/tcse/, see Le Foll 2021c: Appendix for many more) considerably facilitate the task. In addition to spoken corpora and film/TV series, podcasts and videocasts, televised talk shows, radio discussions and interviews can also make for suitable sources of natural spoken English. An example from a broadcast discussion on the topic of sports heroes is printed as (252). It comes from a radio interview and shows that, whilst many aspects of interaction can only be meaningfully conveyed in video material, authentic audio materials can also be meaningfully integrated in the EFL classroom. Their transcripts typically lend themselves better to be printed as textbook dialogues (e.g., (252)) than those of spoken conversational corpora like the Spoken BNC2014 (e.g., (249)).

(252) MARTIN: Well, Jimi, what do you think?
Mr-IZRAEL: I think it's the end of the baseball hero. I mean, it's been
coming for some time. But I think, again, you know, as L. Spence says,
you know, this is kind of a nail in the coffin. I mean, you know, our
kids should be looking up to sports heroes anyway but now we know that
they can for sure, you know. And Howard, you know, I was curious, do you
think he should be in the Hall of Fame after this?
Mr-WITT: No, I don't see how. I mean, you know. Michel said the question
comes down to whether he knew he was taking a banned substance. The
question is what was he taking anything for, you know? I mean, how are
you supposed to explain to your kids, well, he might have been taking
something but it was, you know, might have been okay. I mean, that's
shades of gray there that just shouldn't even exist, you know, taken
after...
Dr-SPENCE: You take pills for headaches, don't you, Howard?
Mr-WITT: What's that?
Dr-SPENCE: Don't you take pills for headaches?
Mr-WITT: Well, I do take pills for headaches.
Mr-IFTIKAR: Yeah, you don't take pills to make your head grow, though.
<COCA: Tell Me More (NPR, 2007)>

Note that, in addition to an abundance of discourse markers (well, I mean, you know, anyway), excerpt (252) also features a number of frequent idioms and chunks with high communicative value (e.g., it's been coming for some time, the final nail in the coffin, the question comes down to whether, etc.). Going beyond its pure linguistic value, a text such as (252) also has the potential to trigger genuinely meaningful discussions among students, e.g., on who deserves to be considered a sports hero, whether athletes are role models for young people, or how doping is influencing professional sport, etc.

As discussed in 7.3.2.1, textbook conversations not only tend to display neat and predictable turn-taking with no hesitations or misunderstandings of any kind, they almost exclusively consist of “referential discourse” (Blyth 2009: 196). Their primary function is “transactional” (Gilmore 2007: 102) or “informational-cognitive” (Blyth 2003: 63, 68). As such, they overwhelmingly neglect the “psychosocial functions of language, such as the creation of solidarity or the display of aggression” (Blyth 2009: 196; see also Cook 2000). This means that pedagogical materials largely fail to represent the more interactional, relationship-building, or psychosocial functions of conversations that may involve “controversial and imaginary content, or emotionally charged interaction” (Cook 2000: 158). Unsurprisingly, it is exactly these kinds of situations that instructed L2 learners often struggle to navigate (Gilmore 2007). This observation ties in with the well-known fact that commercial constraints often lead textbook publishers to avoid contentious topics. This is particularly true of the global EFL/ESL textbook market: textbook authors are often explicitly required to abstain from any mention of “PARSNIP topics” (Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, -Isms, and Pork; Gray 2010: 119; see also Dinh & Siregar 2021; Smith 2020: 21–22), thus contributing to the kind of bland and banal textbook dialogues that are typically associated with EFL textbooks (see also 4.3.2.3). Though European school textbook publishers face slightly different constraints, textbook dialogues depicting difficult relationships are few and far between (see, however, excerpt (212) for an exception).

Some may counter that authentic listening materials – e.g., those drawn from film, TV or radio as discussed above, as well as from podcasts or social media such as YouTube – are inappropriate for lower secondary school EFL teaching because natural delivery rates are too fast for non-proficient speakers of English. Indeed, this is likely one of the reasons why many textbook publishers prefer to feature scripted dialogues which are then performed by professional actors at prescribed delivery rates
deemed more appropriate for beginners. This belief, however, is not supported by the conclusions of empirical research on the effect of delivery rates on EFL learners' listening comprehension: it has repeatedly been shown that lower-than-average speech rates are not beneficiary to or, indeed, preferred by language learners (e.g., Blau 1990; Derwing 1990; 2001; Derwing et al. 2012; Griffiths 1990; 1991; Munro & Derwing 1998; Révész & Brunfaut 2013).

In spite of all the aforementioned advantages of using non-scripted conversational materials, in some cases, it might not be feasible or practical to source suitable, authentic spoken materials. In such cases, textbook authors would do well to draw on corpus data or, at least, the findings of corpus research to arrive at a more realistic portrayal of conversational English. For instance, unnatural-sounding excerpts could be improved by consulting a corpus such as the Spoken BNC2014 (freely accessible on cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk) and adding some of the frequent lexico-grammatical features of spontaneous, interactional speech with high loadings on the 'Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational' dimension. This is illustrated in excerpt (253) which is a revised version of the textbook dialogue printed at the beginning of this section as (248).

(253) **Journalist:** I'm Sally Gordon, reporting from Leicester Square in London and the place is full of sports fans. Let's see who we can talk to.

**Excuse me, Sir. Can I ask you who's your sports hero?**

**Dwayne:** Erm, for me, it'd definitely have to be Chris Hoy, you know, the British track cyclist who won two gold medals. I think [THATD] he really stands for strength and and I really admire his courage because, well, he just never gives up.

**Journalist:** Sure. And erm what about you? Who would you say is your national hero?

**Donna:** Erm, actually, I'm American so Kobe Bryant, for sure. We're kind of very patriotic, especially when it comes to sports, if you know what I mean.

**Journalist:** And would you say [THATD] basketball is your sport then?

**Donna:** Yeah I am into basketball and that and, you know, I think [THATD] he's really shown the world we're still the best at it!

**Journalist:** Mm.

**Donna:** Oh and I shouldn't forget Michael Phelps, of course.

**Journalist:** Uhu. What makes you say that?

**Donna:** You kidding? I mean, he's just won like four gold medals and two silver.

**Journalist:** Right, he did, didn't he?

**Donna:** And he's a record holder! I guess what I'm saying is the dream came true.

**Journalist:** Right.

**Donna:** Yeah, he's just incredible. I mean that's why we call him "the Baltimore Bullet" because he's all about determination, generosity, hope... he's all about all these really great values. You see, he's he's a role model! And we'll never forget him, that's for sure.
This revised version features more ‘mental’ verbs (e.g. THINK, FORGET), *that* omissions (marked [THATD]), contracted and negated verbs, present tense verbs, first- and second-person references, emphatics (*definitely, really*), causative subordination (*because*), discourse and pragmatic markers (*well, you know, if you know what I mean, what I’m saying is*), hedges (*kind of*), fillers and interjections (*erm, oh, yeah*), the modal *would*, demonstrative pronouns, and ‘stranded’ prepositions (e.g., *let’s see who can talk to*) than the original textbook dialogue (248). As example (253) shows, such additions will also naturally lead to revised dialogues with lower type/token ratios, shorter average word lengths and, in particular, lower noun/verb ratios, which all contribute to higher scores on the first ‘Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational’ dimension (see 7.3.2), too.

Though it was not the object of this study to investigate the pedagogical efficacy of
the language of school EFL textbooks, there is reason to believe that textbook
dialogues with high Dimension 1 scores are better models for EFL learners to acquire
the necessary skills to navigate real-life conversational situations (O’Keeffe, McCarthy
& Carter 2007: 21). In particular, this includes the competent use of a variety of
fluency-enhancing strategies to overcome planning phases and manage turn-taking.
Interestingly, learner corpus research has shown that EFL learners significantly
underuse discourse and vagueness markers as compared to native speakers and tend
to rely more on filled and unfilled pauses and/or on a very limited set of such markers,
instead (e.g., Müller 2005; Götz 2013; Gilquin 2016b; Dumont 2018). Wolk, Götz &
Jäschke (2021: 4) have suggested that this frequently observed underuse of discourse
markers in learner speech “might stem from the fact that an explicit teaching of
discourse markers as a fluency-enhancing strategy has not been systematically
integrated into EFL textbooks” (see also Gilquin 2016b). Though these studies were
conducted on diverse learner populations who will have learnt with a variety of
textbook and non-textbook materials, the results of the present study nevertheless
lend support to this hypothesis – especially given that, in this respect, Textbook
English is relatively homogenous: all nine textbook series of the TEC were found to,
on average, misrepresent natural conversation in very similar ways.

8.2.2 Improving representations of informative texts

Although the results of Chapters 6 and 7 showed that, on the whole, the informative
texts of the more advanced textbooks of the TEC are linguistically very similar to
informative texts aimed at teenagers, some texts stood out as being more
prototypically “textbook-like” than representative of this register. An example of such
a text was already presented in 8.1: excerpt (245), about soap operas, was written in
the style of a teenager magazine and, indeed, close inspection of the random effects
associated with the Teen Vogue subcorpus of the Info Teens corpus (see 3.3.2.3) in
7.3.2 suggests that, on both the ‘Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational’
and the ‘Narrative vs. Non-narrative’ dimensions of the second PCA-based model,
Teen Vogue texts are closer to Textbook Informative texts than the rest of the reference Info Teens corpus of informative texts targeted at English-speaking teenagers.

Whilst this type of informative writing certainly has its place in secondary school EFL textbooks, some of the informative texts that also score high on the ‘Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational’ dimension make for rather unlikely candidate articles in such publication outlets. Text (254), for instance, is an informative text from a French textbook used in the fourth year of secondary English tuition that scores considerably higher than most texts of the reference Info Teens corpus on both the ‘Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational’ and the ‘Pedagogically adapted vs. Natural’ dimensions.

(254) Iwokrama, in what is called the Guiana shield, is a tropical rainforest reserve. **Because** there are only three other rainforest ecosystems like this in the world, Iwokrama is invaluable. It's a part of "the lungs of the earth".

Moreover, it's in a pristine state: it is **as if it had been untouched by humans. As though nobody had ever cut a tree!** But **indigenous people have lived there**: they have just done **so very discreetly**, leaving their natural environment **pretty much intact**.

Guyana's landscapes and wildlife are not only protected, they are also stunning: the Kaieteur Falls are majestic and **it's** as if animals and plants were all "giant"! **You can** meet giant anteaters, giant water lilies, giant leaf frogs and giant otters!

**Because** this is such a unique place, Iwokrama has been made into an official reserve. The priority is the preservation of the rainforest. **But** this does not mean that Guyana refuses to make money out of the forest: **it just** has to be done sustainably so, with income for the communities that live there rather than gains for investors on the other side of the world. <TEC: Piece of Cake 3º>

The interactive web-based version of the textbook gives the impression that this is an authentic text and claims that it was “Adapted from Iwokrama.org.” (https://www.lelivrescolaire.fr/page/16871655, 14.02.2022) – the official website of the *Iwokrama International Centre for Rain Forest Conservation and Development*. However, no text resembling the one featured in the textbook could be found on this informative website. In fact, text (254) has several tell-tale signs of a pedagogically doctored text. It hovers between different degrees of formality (e.g., *moreover* vs. *pretty much*) and, as such, sits rather uncomfortably between different registers. In this particular case, there is no doubt that the text was constructed around a pre-defined grammatical syllabus: the second paragraph features two *as if* conditional sentences (*as if it had been* and *as though nobody had ever*) and the textbook unit in which it is embedded includes several exercises on this grammatical structure (see
Fig. 88 and Fig. 89, both taken from (https://www.lelivrescolaire.fr/page/16871655, 14.02.2022). In both cases, the use of the past perfect in these two conditional sentences is clearly contrived: the present perfect would have sufficed. Moreover, whilst BE *untouched* is attested in corpora of naturally occurring English, the collocation REMAIN *untouched* is considerably more frequent and would have been a more idiomatic choice. It would also have helped address the fact that, across all registers, Textbook English features more occurrences of BE as a main verb per finite verb phrase (FVP) than in naturally occurring English.

<figure><img src="image_94.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 88: Exercise featured below (254)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_95.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 89: Grammar box featured below (254)</figcaption></figure>

Interestingly, a cursory look at the Iwokrama centre's website suffices to spot engaging materials which could be integrated with very few modifications into such a unit on the preservation of tropical rainforests for this particular proficiency level, e.g., (255). As an aside, it is also worth noting that excerpt (254) is potentially misleading in that the phrase "*have lived there*" without a temporal marker implies that indigenous people no longer live in the Iwokrama Forest. The reader will notice that excerpt (255) does not involve such ambiguity.

**(255) DID YOU KNOW?**

The Iwokrama Forest is located in central Guyana, approximately 300 km south of Georgetown, the capital. The area encompasses about 371,000 hectares and is covered in **lush, intact lowland tropical** forest. The wide range of intact habitats in the Iwokrama Forest supports a diverse **flora and fauna** with an estimated 1,500-2,000 higher plant species, 420 species of fish, 150 species of snakes, lizards and **frogs**, 500 species of birds and 180 species of mammals. [...]

**VIEWING TIPS!**

Most mammals are secretive and can be hard to see. Since many mammals are nocturnal, a good way to see them is at night with the help of a headlamp. Fruiting trees are also a good place to see mammals as they congregate to feed. And always keep an eye on the ground for signs - especially tracks in the wet mud on the edge of pools. [...]

**DID YOU KNOW?**

The Iwokrama Forest is in the homeland of the Makushi people, **who have lived in and used the forest for thousands of years.** People are a critical part of the **ecosystem** and the success of Iwokrama relies on the
combined skills of specialists and its community partners.
<https://iwokrama.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Iwokrama-Mammal-Guide-2017-Web.pdf, 14.02.2022>

Drawing on real-world resources to source ELT materials such as (255) affords learners valuable opportunities to acquire English in naturally occurring contexts. In a usage-based L2 instruction paradigm, context is known to be paramount to supporting language comprehension and pattern abstraction; however, it can also “be a stressor that introduces noise, complexity, and cognitive overload” (Tyler & Ortega 2018: 17–18). Hence, in some cases, it may make pedagogical sense to adapt authentic texts for specific proficiency levels and/or learner groups. Should textbook authors or teachers be worried that a text such as (255), drawn from a resource not especially targeted at L2 learners, could feature vocabulary that may be too demanding for their target learner group, user-friendly corpus-based tools can be used to identify potentially problematic lexical items. For instance, the free text analysis tool from english-corpora.org can be used to highlight the least frequent words based on frequency data from the COCA (Fig. 90).

<figure><img src="image_96.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 90: Word frequency analysis with english-corpora.org (on the basis of COCA data) of excerpt (255)</figcaption></figure>

Some of these low-frequency words (highlighted in blue and listed in the left-hand column of the table in Fig. 90) were already featured in the textbook excerpt (254) (e.g., *ecosystem*, *frog*). Others could easily be replaced by more frequent alternatives without compromising on the style of writing (e.g., *flora and fauna* → *plants and animals*). In choosing which low-frequency words to potentially replace, teachers and textbook authors would do well to focus on isotopy, i.e., on the lexical items that involve semantic redundancy, rather than on those that involve strong collocational associations or make important contributions to a text’s overall coherence (Hausmann 2005). For example, consider *lush*, *intact* and *tropical* in the first paragraph of excerpt (255). These are three low-frequency and semantically closely related words that are used to describe the *forest*. They need not all be included. Alternatively, clicking on any of the coloured words in the text analysis tool illustrated in Fig. 92 redirects the user to that word’s ‘word sketch’ page. Fig. 91 is an excerpt of the word sketch for
the word *lush*. It shows a list of topics associated with the word, its most strongly associated collocates and makes suggestions for (potential) synonyms – all derived from the data of the COCA. On the basis of this information, teachers and materials designers may decide to replace *lush* with a higher-frequency word that learners are expected to already be familiar with, e.g., *beautiful* or *green*. In addition, learners’ previous knowledge can be drawn on to make pedagogically informed adjustments to authentic texts. In the context of secondary EFL instruction, this also means taking account of which lexical items are cognates in the learners’ L1 or school language. Thus, given that excerpt (254) is from a French EFL textbook, the adjectives *intact* and *tropical* should not pose a problem and can therefore be left unmodified. By the same token, with French L1 speakers as the target readership, *fertile* (see Fig. 91) could be chosen as an alternative to the word *lush* in this particular context.

<figure><img src="image_97.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 91: Part of the ‘word sketch’ page of the word *lush* as generated on english-corpora.org/coca</figcaption></figure>

Note that, as shown on Fig. 92, and perhaps contrary to teachers’ expectations, it is not the case that text (254), crafted specifically for pedagogical purposes, contains fewer low-frequency words than the one taken verbatim from *Iwokrama.org*.
<figure><img src="image_98.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 92: Word frequency analysis with <u>english-corpora.org</u> (on the basis of COCA data) of excerpt (254)</figcaption></figure>

Corpus tools can also be used to check whether a chosen alternative is suitable for any given register. For example, the ‘word sketch’ page of *moreover* (see Fig. 93 for an extract) shows that *moreover* is typical of academic writing but comparatively rare in news reports. Thus, in the context of (254), there is no doubt that the more versatile alternative *also* would have been more appropriate. As an aside, it is worth noting that *moreover* is known to be overused in Learner Englishes, in particular with French L1 speakers, including in registers where it is not the most idiomatic choice (see, e.g., Granger & Tribble 1998: 208).

<figure><img src="image_99.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 93: Part of the "word sketch" page of the word *moreover* on <u>english-corpora.org/coca</u></figcaption></figure>

Compared with sourcing suitable conversational data for pedagogical use, finding suitable informative texts is much easier. For informative texts, good web searching strategies should suffice to find suitable texts on almost any topic of interest. A broad
range of different text registers are available on the internet. However, it is crucial
that textbook authors, editors and teachers be aware of register-driven linguistic
differences in order to avoid creating patchwork texts that result in unnatural
sounding texts such as (254). Excerpts (256) and (257), which are both on the same
topic yet clearly fulfil very different functions and are therefore written in very
different styles, illustrate two such registers. Both could easily be adapted for use in
the EFL classroom. Note how (256) would score lower than most textbook informative
texts on the ‘Spontaneous interactional vs. Edited informational’ dimension as a result
of its high frequency of passive constructions, coordinating conjunctions and non-
finite -ed and -ing verb forms, among other features. It also boasts a number of useful
collocations and constructions of the kind often missing from pedagogically adapted
textbook texts (e.g., *SEEK to do sth.*, *BOAST a wide range of*, *MAKE sth. an ideal sth.*,
*over the years, the likes of*, etc.).

(256) The Iwokrama International Centre for Rainforest Conservation is an autonomous, non-profit institution which **was set up** to manage the Iwokrama forest, **as** a "living laboratory".

The aim of the centre is to show how tropical forests can **be conserved** and sustainably **used** for ecological, social and economic benefits to local national and international communities. [...] The Iwokrama forest is in the homeland of the Makushi people who have lived and used the forest for thousands of years. **As such,** the Centre got its name Iwokrama from the range of mountains and **according to** the indigenous peoples, Iwokrama means 'place of refuge'.

Since its creation, Iwokrama has sought to **advance best practices** in the sustainable management of the world's remaining rain forests. It currently **boasts a wide range** of diverse flora and fauna **making it an ideal location** for bird-watching lovers, students, scientists, volunteers and interns **interested in seeing** and **experiencing** the untouched, lush rain forest. And, **over the years,** the Centre has attracted **the likes of** His Royal Highness Prince Charles; Prince Harry; President David Granger and First Lady Sandra Granger, Ministers of government, **among others.**

<https://guyanachronicle.com/2019/03/24/iwokrama-30-years-on,
14.02.2022>

As a marketing text with many imperatives, contracted verbs and first-person
references, excerpt (257) would likely score higher than (256) on the ‘Spontaneous
interactional vs. Edited informational’ dimension. It is very representative of its genre
and, on the website from which it was sourced, is illustrated with many photos (e.g.,
of the *canopy walk*) that could support students’ comprehension of the text without
having to (systematically) resort to translation into students’ first/school language.

(257) If you're considering travel to South America, step outside the box of typical Brazil beach vacations or Colombian coffee tours. Here, we introduce you to the beautiful country of Guyana, which will feel like an authentic slice of the "real" South America, from its pristine rainforest to its welcoming villages. Nature and wildlife lovers are at home here, where first-hand exploration of the untrammeled countryside
is encouraged. There's an unmistakable pride in Guyana's people, as they
**open their doors and hearts** to **curious travelers** seeking eco-friendly
vacations, cultural immersion and a Lost World vibe. **Get** to Guyana now,
before the crowds arrive. [...]

In a country that is 80 percent covered with **virgin tropical rainforest,**
**it makes sense that** one of its top tourist attractions is a center
focused on its conservation. **Feel as one with** the jungle as **you** tackle
the canopy walk in the middle of the reserve - the birdwatching at this
vantage point is unbelievable. The jaguar lives here - South America's
largest cat - and while **we can't promise you a glimpse of** this elusive
feline, **we** can almost guarantee that **you'll** meet ocelots, river turtles,
otters, anteaters, caimans and more. **You** may even see a Goliath bird-
eating spider as large as **your** fist! <https://navsumo.com/top-11-sights-to-see-in-guyana, 14.02.2022>

8.2.3 Towards a register approach to teaching EFL

In sum, the two preceding sections have demonstrated that, if the language to be
taught in EFL textbooks is to be genuinely relevant to students’ present and future
lives, textbook materials must acknowledge that English is not a “monolithic block”
(Rühlemann 2008: 681); but rather that, like all languages, English varies across
different situational contexts of use. A large body of corpus linguistic research has
demonstrated that various extralinguistic, socio-functional aspects of register have a
direct impact on the linguistic features that characterise them (Crystal 2018: 490).
Indeed, modern corpus-informed grammars of English no longer present “Standard
English” as a single, homogenous language variety (as did, e.g., Quirk et al. 1985)
but rather show how grammar varies across modes (e.g., in the *Cambridge Grammar
of English*; Carter & McCarthy 2006b) and/or major registers (e.g., in the *Longman
Grammar of Spoken and Written English*; Biber et al. 1999; 2021). This is necessary
because vocabulary and grammar vary according to sociocultural, situational and
functional contexts.

The model of intra-textbook variation presented in 7.3.1 has shown that a certain
amount of situational/functional variation is already (implicitly) present across the
texts featured in secondary school EFL textbooks. However, the continued prevalence
of pedagogically adapted, artificial texts results in considerably less register-based
linguistic variation than across situationally similar registers that EFL learners can
be expected to encounter outside the classroom (see 7.3.2). In particular, most
textbook representations of conversation remain very close to written norms and the
grammatical phenomena that continue to form the backbone of textbook progressions
are still taught as universally valid across all registers. Thus, it is fair to say that
Conrad's (2000) optimistic prediction two decades ago that corpus linguistics could
“revolutionise the teaching of grammar” and that, among other consequences,
“[m]onolithic descriptions of English grammar [would] be replaced by register-specific
descriptions” (Conrad 2000: 549) has not been fulfilled.
As the examples of the previous sections have shown, a register-sensitive approach to
teaching English goes well beyond grammar. It involves all elements of the lexico-
grammatical continuum. In fact, this study has repeatedly hinted at the fact that it
also entails a re-appraisal of the semantic and pragmatic content of some textbook
texts as modern school EFL materials largely continue to avoid potentially
contentious topics (see also Timmis 2016: 5) and thus almost exclusively model
harmonious, largely transactional interactions between proficient English users (see
8.2.1).

It is with similar concerns in mind that Rühlemann (2008) proposed a “register
approach to teaching conversation”. He convincingly argued that:

the mismatch between school English and spoken English amounts to a mismatch between
the end and the means deployed to reach it: SE-based [Standard English-based] school
English fails to support learners in reaching their goal—to approximate to authentic English
(Rühlemann 2008: 688).

The present study has shown that – although the gap between textbook dialogues
and real-life English conversation is certainly the most worrying – this issue in fact
concerns all registers. Adopting a register approach would certainly entail a number
of long-term changes that cannot be expected to happen overnight. In many ways,
however, it is quite surprising that register is still not firmly anchored in ELT,
especially given that European school EFL curricula are now all aligned with the
CEFR and that many of the *can-do* statements of the CEFR very much imply a
register approach, e.g.:

**B1** Can scan through straightforward, **factual texts in magazines, brochures** or on the **web**, identify what they are about and decide whether they contain information that might be of practical use. Can find and understand relevant information in everyday material, such as **letters, brochures** and **short official documents**. Can pick out important information about preparation and usage on the **labels on foodstuff and medicine**. Can assess whether an **article, report or review** is on the required topic. Can understand the important information in simple, clearly drafted **adverts in newspapers or magazines**, provided there are not too many abbreviations.

**A2** Can find specific information in practical, concrete, predictable texts (e.g. **travel guidebooks, recipes**), provided they are produced in simple language. Can understand the main information in short and simple **descriptions of goods in brochures** and **websites** (e.g. portable digital devices, cameras). Can find specific, predictable information in simple everyday material such as **advertisements, prospectuses, menus, reference lists** and **timetables**. (CEFR “Reading for orientation”; Council of Europe 2020: 56 emphases added)

**B2** Can read for pleasure with a large degree of independence, adapting style and speed of reading to different texts (e.g. **magazines**, more straightforward **novels, history books, biographies, travelogues, guides, lyrics, poems**), using appropriate reference sources selectively. Can read novels with a strong, narrative plot and that use straightforward, unelaborated language, provided they can take their time and use a dictionary.

**B1** Can read **newspaper/magazine accounts of films, books, concerts**, etc. produced for a wider audience and understand the main points. Can understand simple **poems** and
song lyrics provided these employ straightforward language and style. (CEFR “Reading as a leisure activity”; Council of Europe 2020: 59 emphases added)

This is true of all four categories of communicative language activities described in the CEFR: reception, production, interaction and mediation. For instance, for oral interaction, the CEFR (Council of Europe 2020: 71) mentions a range of linguistically quite distinct registers:

* interpersonal: “Conversation”;

* evaluative: “Informal discussion (with friends)”; “Formal discussion (meetings)”, “Goal-oriented collaboration”;

* transactional: “Information exchange”, “Obtaining goods and services”, “Interviewing and being interviewed”, and “Using telecommunications”.

The present study has demonstrated that modern secondary school EFL textbooks very rarely model realistic “interpersonal” and “evaluative oral interactions” (see 8.2.4). Given the current state of affairs, we may therefore question how learners are supposed to achieve descriptors such as:

B2 Can establish a relationship with interlocutors through sympathetic questioning and expressions of agreement plus, if appropriate, comments about third parties or shared conditions. Can indicate reservations and reluctance, state conditions when agreeing to requests or granting permission, and ask for understanding of their own position. Can engage in extended conversation on most general topics in a clearly participatory fashion, even in a [audially/visually] noisy environment. Can sustain relationships with users of the target language without unintentionally amusing or irritating them or requiring them to behave other than they would with another proficient language user. Can convey degrees of emotion and highlight the personal significance of events and experiences. (Council of Europe 2020: 73)

Not only is a monolithic understanding of English not compatible with the CEFR and the many school curricula which are based on the framework, it is also not in line with a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach (see Crawford & Zhang 2021). Indeed, in TBLT, learners are pushed to acquire language skills through real-world communicative situations which, as decades of corpus linguistic research have shown, will naturally have specific situational characteristics that, in turn, call for register-specific patterns of language use.

Decades after the so-called ‘communicative turn’ to foreign language teaching, it is somewhat disconcerting that learners are still not encouraged to communicate in differentiated ways depending on the situational context. In effect, students are left to deduce this by themselves. As exemplified by the interview excerpts in 8.2, many learners are aware that the kind of English they engage with outside the classroom is different from the kind of “Textbook English”, “*Schulenglisch*” or “*inglés de libro*” that they learn at school.

We also noted in 1.6 that a large proportion of teenagers in Germany regularly engage with media in English (Feierabend et al. 2020: 48) and we can expect this trend to
be on the rise throughout Europe and beyond. What is striking is that, at least in Germany, there appears to be a genuine disconnect between students', sometimes quite extensive, contact with English outside the classroom and their English teachers' estimates of the quantity, quality and pedagogical value of that input (see, e.g., the results of a survey and focus group interviews with Year 9 students and their teachers in Grau 2009; for a more recent assessment of the situation and its underlying causes, see Blume 2020). A resolute commitment to a register approach could help to bridge this gap by helping learners and their teachers to understand the value of extracurricular English input whilst highlighting important linguistic differences between the various registers that learners encounter both *in* and *outside* the EFL classroom (see also Roberts & Cooke 2009). The author therefore proposes that a register approach can contribute to bringing together what Grau (2009: 161) refers to as "English from above" and "English from below", i.e., English as it is taught in the EFL classroom and English as it is "playfully taken up by German youths [or any other English L2 learners] and integrated into their own language" (Grau 2009: 163). In a similar vein, Willis' claim (2003: 224) that "[r]eal language provides a refreshing link between the classroom and the world outside" ties in with the need to do away with artificial, 'register-neutral' textbook language. In short, by adopting a register-sensitive approach, EFL teachers can acknowledge and validate learners' extracurricular exposure to English, whilst highlighting relevant register-driven differences in frequent, and therefore contextually appropriate, language use.

Although it is in line with the curricula of the educational systems examined in the present study (see 1.2) and the CEFR (see above), adopting a comprehensive register approach to secondary school EFL teaching undoubtedly entails a major overhaul in how English is taught. In particular, it carries far-reaching implications for EFL teachers and all those involved in pre- and in-service teacher education, as well as textbook authors, editors and publishers. Implications for teacher training will first be sketched out in 8.2.4. This will be followed by some thoughts as to how the textbook publishing industry could contribute to such a shift in perspective in 8.2.5.

### 8.2.4 Implications for teacher education

The introduction of a register approach to secondary EFL instruction can only succeed if a number of prerequisites are met. The first perhaps obvious – but by no means trivial – prerequisite is that (future) English teachers be aware of and knowledgeable about register-driven variation. A recent survey of 80 English schoolteachers from Sweden and Germany suggests that this is not yet common knowledge: in their answers on target language norms, many of the surveyed teachers appear to perceive standard target varieties of English as stable and homogenous entities (Forsberg, Mohr & Jansen 2019; Mohr, Jansen & Forsberg 2019). This is also the author's impression having worked with pre-service teachers of English at a German university for the past five years. Whilst student teachers are familiar with
some of the most obvious differences between regional (mostly inner-circle) varieties
of English (especially lexical and pronunciation differences between British and
American English), on the whole, they are largely oblivious to register-based linguistic
variation. In fact, they frequently react with scepticism at any suggestion that lexico-
grammar be subject to any form of situational variation (see also, more broadly,
Wiese et al. 2017 regarding teachers' attitudes towards linguistic diversity in
Germany; and Hall et al. 2017 for a report of similar teacher beliefs in the context of
ELT in China). This does not come as a surprise since these pre-service teachers have
themselves learnt English (and other foreign languages) in educational systems that
do not foresee such variation.

Hence, the first implication for teacher education resides in the content of future EFL teachers' English linguistics classes which, at least in Germany, are usually limited to an introductory lecture followed by one or two elective seminars on more specialised topics (Jansen, Mohr & Forsberg 2021: 67-69). Bridges between linguistics as an academic discipline and student teachers' future careers are not always made explicit and many students fail to grasp the connection between what they are expected to learn in these courses and their future professional roles (see, e.g., Diehr 2018; 2020; Siepmann 2018b; Sommer 2020). In fact, in many cases, the practical English language classes they attend at university continue to propagate the myth of 'proper', 'Standard English' as a homogenous, register-neutral entity. Often, the only exception made is for Academic English - though, here too, it is not infrequent for the language of lectures, conference presentations and journal articles to be considered as one register and taught as such, resulting in some students confusing spoken and written academic discourse. Student teachers' university-level language practice classes therefore also have a crucial role to play in paving the way for a register-sensitive approach to EFL teaching.

At this stage, it is worth remembering that the development of register-sensitive
language skills is a “universal process” that both L1 and L2 users develop over time
(Gray & Egbert 2021: 177). Jansen et al. (2021) suggest that EFL student teachers
may need to first reflect on the sociolinguistic implications of standard varieties in
their L1(s) before they can begin to question Standard English ideologies and their
implications in the EFL classroom. The same principle may also apply to register
awareness: it may be beneficial to elucidate how language varies across different
registers in students’ L1 before transferring this sociolinguistic awareness to English.

Increased sociolinguistic knowledge, alone, however, will not suffice to bring about
any meaningful change in the EFL classroom. The second, essential prerequisite to
the successful introduction of a register approach in ELT entails a fundamental
change in teachers' attitudes. This is something that should be addressed in pre-
service English/foreign language education classes. On the introduction of
conversational grammar in the EFL classroom, Rühlemann (2008: 682) notes that:

many teachers are likely to perceive the advent of conversational grammar as a threat to
dearly held habits and convictions. To them, conversational grammar may simply be 'bad
grammar' and, hence, not worth teaching.

In many cases, a register-sensitive approach will entail abandoning the conveniently
simplistic dichotomy of ‘correct’ vs. ‘incorrect’ across all situations of use. Instead, it
calls on notions of frequency and ‘appropriateness’ within specific contexts of use.
Thus, rather than being able to apply a single rule:

in a register approach, what is appropriate depends on the register and the specific set of
conditions in that register constraining the use of the form in question (Rühlemann 2008:
682).

Resistance to long-held teacher beliefs and socially entrenched expectations that particular lexico-grammatical structures are either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is to be expected – though it remains to add that this is hardly a radically new idea, either (see, e.g., the concepts of ‘appropriateness’ and ‘conformity’ in traditional stylistics Crystal & Davy 1969: 4–7, 149–150).

Beyond gaining the necessary sociolinguistic knowledge and developing the willingness
to apply this knowledge in the classroom, Rühlemann (2008: 682) emphasises that
practical concerns will also need to be addressed:

[t]he problem arising is less that correctness may be a dearly held notion that is hard to dispense with than rather that appropriateness is more difficult to handle.

This issue of added complexity is also acknowledged by Koch & Oesterreicher (2011: 276):

Der Unterricht wird freilich durch die Berücksichtigung konzeptioneller Varianz für den Schüler keineswegs leichter. Dieser muss nunmehr alternative Regeln erlernen und in der Lage sein, sie situationsadäquat anzuwenden [However, by no means does taking contextual variation into account make learning any easier for students. They must now learn alternative rules and be able to apply them appropriately according to the situation].

The truth is, whether we like it or not, no language is monolithic. Corpus linguistics
and, in particular, corpus-based register analysis has provided ample quantitative
evidence supporting “the reality of underlying functional dimensions of language use”
(Egbert & Biber 2018: 271). In fact, even young learners appreciate that the kind of
English they engage with outside the classroom, e.g., on social media, is different from
what they are expected to produce in an academic essay. In other words, rather than
complicating teachers’ jobs, a register approach can instead help foreign language
teachers explain, on the one hand, why some structures may be “grammatically
acceptable” yet not appropriate in specific contexts of use and, on the other, why
other structures may be widely attested and therefore idiomatic in some registers, yet
very rare and therefore inappropriate in other situational contexts. Of course, this is
also true in learners’ L1/school language; thus, it may be beneficial to first raise
awareness and illustrate the principle of register-specific patterns of language use in students' L1/school language before applying it to students' L2.

Ultimately, the author is convinced that if the foremost aim of school foreign language teaching is to develop learners' communicative competence, language learning cannot be detached from the situational contexts in which this communication is to take place. This is not to say that all aspects of the English lexico-grammatical system ought to be subdivided into an array of registers from the very first stages of language acquisition. Like all aspects of language acquisition, the process will necessarily be gradual. Learners will need to be encouraged, over time, to develop register awareness and to vary their language use according to different situational contexts. It probably makes sense to begin with key distinctions between the two poles of broad oral/informal/immediate vs. literate/formal/distant continuum of English variation (see also Chafe 1982; Koch & Oesterreicher 1985; 2011) before moving to finer-grained distinctions as learners develop their language skills and expand the repertoire of communicative situations they are expected to master in English.

As shown in 8.2.1 and 8.2.2, even basic corpus literacy can go a long way in helping teachers to source and adapt suitable teaching materials. The need to systematically integrate corpus literacy in the curricula of English teacher training study programmes is thus the third implication for teacher education (see also, among others, Callies 2016; 2019; Leńko-Szymańska 2017). Corpus linguistics can, to begin with, be used as an “eye-opener” for pre- and in-service teachers to understand why the doctrinal correct/incorrect dichotomy is not only unhelpful, but also often inaccurate in light of real language data. It is not within the scope of the present chapter to describe the kinds of corpus-based data-driven learning activities that may be used to introduce (student) teachers to register-based variation in English, but the evaluation of a project-based seminar conducted by the author (Le Foll 2020b; 2021d) suggests that activities that encourage students to debunk normative linguistic myths are particularly effective (see also the “surprise-the-teacher” modules suggested by Mukherjee 2004; as well as numerous books with suggestions for activities, e.g.: Bennett 2010; Crosthwaite 2020; Frigital 2018; Le Foll 2021c; O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter 2007; Pérez-Paredes & Mark 2021; Timmis 2015).

In this context, corpus literacy is to be understood as a subset of skills belonging, more broadly, to teachers' professional (critical) digital literacy and competence. Even pre-COVID-19, studies had shown that, whilst many teachers were interested in using more digital tools and media in their instruction, many were also acutely aware of their limited knowledge and competence in this area (e.g., Diz-Otero et al. 2022; Rohleder 2019). The pressing need for professional development opportunities in this domain was made all the more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when teachers were forced to shift to online teaching with little to no preparation and, in many cases, suitable devices and/or infrastructure (see, e.g., Kerres 2020; Starkey et al.
2021; van de Werfhorst, Kessenich & Geven 2020). Reflecting on the situation in Germany, Blume (2020: 890) suggested that teachers often lack both the necessary theoretical and practical knowledge to develop their own materials and make meaningful use of web-based tools and materials. Studies suggest that the situation is comparable in France, Spain and across Europe (see, e.g., Fominykh et al. 2021). Few teachers appear to be aware of high-quality resources other than those proposed by the handful of textbook publishers that dominate each domestic market. Thus, in addition to raising awareness of what constitutes “Textbook English” from a linguistic point of view and reflecting, more generally, on the advantages and limitations of commercially published materials, teacher education in the 21st century also ought to focus on ‘technological pedagogical content knowledge’ (Mishra & Koehler 2006) and aim to develop future teachers’ critical digital literacy and competence. Such courses would likely need to begin with relatively basic, general professional skills such as effective web searching strategies before moving to more complex, subject-specific competences such as ELT materials design and adaptation. The aforementioned pilot project led by the author demonstrated the potential and impact of project-based seminars in which student teachers engage in creating, adapting and reusing Open Educational Resources (OER) in ways that can create bridges not only between theory and practice, but also between pre-service teacher education, in-service teacher training and continuous professional development (Le Foll 2021c; see also Kosmas et al. 2021; Vyatkina 2020).

Although 8.2.1 and 8.2.2 explained how teachers can easily find and, if necessary, adapt authentic texts to create pedagogical materials for their students, the author is not suggesting that, at least at lower secondary school level, we do away with foreign language textbooks altogether. For a start, teachers’ workloads in most European school systems simply do not allow enough time for this to be feasible. But even if time were not a constraint, the reality is that most teacher education programmes currently do not adequately prepare teachers for this task. In fact, it has been argued that commercially published textbooks – together with their handy multimodal packages consisting of texts, tasks and exercises, teacher handbooks, assessment materials, additional worksheets, games, etc. – play a crucial role in supporting inexperienced teachers. Schäfer (2003: 305) goes as far as to claim:

> Wer die Abschaffung des Lehrbuchs fordert, sollte gute Alternativen zu bieten haben. Immerhin bietet es Halteseile für den unsicheren Lehrer und schützt den Schüler vor dem schlechten Lehrer [Those who claim we should do away with textbooks ought to propose good alternative offers. After all, textbooks act as safety lines for insecure teachers and protect pupils from incompetent teachers].

The metaphor may seem like an exaggeration to some but, even if there is only a semblance of truth in the statement, it points to an alarming situation. For a start, it begs the question as to why teachers are placed in such a perilous situation that “safety lines” are necessary in the first place. It also places a disproportionate amount
of responsibility on the textbook industry that appears to be effectively tasked with
filling glaring gaps in university teacher education with bite-size on-the-job training
materials. Hence, a final yet crucial implication for teacher education consists in a
much stronger emphasis, in pre- and in-service training, on the selection and use of
pedagogical materials, including the considered and deliberate use of commercially-
published textbook materials – many of which, it is worth reminding, are of excellent
quality. At the end of the day, textbooks are not categorically ‘good’ or ‘bad’,
’suitable’ or ‘unsuitable’; however, the way they are exploited in the classroom may
be effective or not. It is very much a case of: “Coursebooks don’t kill learning, bad
teachers kill learning” (Chong 2012). Thus, teacher education programmes would also
do well to emphasise that:

Kein Lehrwerk passt von selber zu jeder Lernsituation - und schon gar nicht gleichermaßen
zu den Bedürfnissen eines jeden Lerners in einer größeren Lerngruppe: Lehrwerke sind vom
Prinzip her auf aktive Interpretation angelegt [No textbook will, in and of itself, suit every
learning situation – and can certainly not be expected to fulfil the needs of every learner in
larger learning groups: textbooks are fundamentally designed to be actively interpreted].

(Vielau 2005: n.p.; see also, e.g., Nold 1998)

In sum, this section has made clear that teacher education – at all stages of teachers’
careers – has a paramount role to play in addressing teachers’ gaps in knowledge,
competence, attitudes and beliefs on a range of issues relevant to successfully
implementing a register approach in the secondary EFL classroom. These include
raising awareness of what constitutes “Textbook English” and challenging the status
of the textbook as “*the* authorised/legitimated educational medium for language
learning” (Canale 2021: 1; emphasis original) on all language-related matters and as
the best or “safest” way to implement the curriculum. It also involves developing
teachers’ own register awareness, both in their L1(s) and L2(s), by placing a stronger
emphasis on the acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in pre-service teacher
education. Furthermore, it entails a shift away from register-neutral dichotomies of
*right* or *wrong* towards situationally-dependent notions of *frequency*, *idiomaticity* and
*appropriateness* in specific contexts of use. Finally, this section has also pointed to
the need for teacher education curricula to systematically integrate the building of
both theoretical and practical skills in ELT materials design, including sourcing
suitable authentic texts from online resources, adapting them to learners’ needs, and
making competent use of corpora and corpus tools.

8.2.5 Implications for materials design

As we have seen, at lower secondary school level, foreign language textbooks are seen
as “indispensable” (Leroy 2012: 62) and, for a whole host of reasons, are unlikely to
become obsolete any time soon. Hence, it goes without saying that this paradigm shift
towards a register approach to ELT cannot happen without the involvement of the
textbook publishing industry.
It is worth noting that, of the three major textbook registers compared to equivalent registers from outside the EFL classroom in 6.3.2 and 7.3.2, Textbook Fiction was, across all linguistic analyses, found to be the closest to its corresponding reference corpus. We concluded that this finding is not particularly surprising given that many of these fictional texts are excerpts of published novels and short stories. Those that are not, however, have been shown to be either practically indistinguishable from texts originally written as novels or short stories (thus, demonstrating that, on the whole, textbook authors appear to have an excellent command of this register) or have been convincingly written with low proficiency level learners in mind (e.g., using present-tense narration and low lexical diversity for beginner learners). However, the same cannot be said of representations of the informative and, in particular, conversation texts featured in the textbooks of the TEC. In contrast to the fictional texts typically found in EFL textbooks, the majority of these texts are crafted by textbook authors, presumably following strict pedagogically motivated guidelines.

Adopting a register approach would require textbook authors and editors to systematically account for register-driven linguistic variation when selecting, adapting and drafting textbook texts. How this could be achieved using corpus data and tools has already been exemplified in 8.2.1 and 8.2.2. These suggestions and recommendations are by no means new or particularly innovative. More than three decades ago, Sinclair (1991: 39–51) already explained why lexicographers and other applied linguists would do well to rely less on a combination of existing descriptions of languages and (native-speaker) introspection and more on attested language data in the form of large corpora. Yet, whilst it is true that corpora have since revolutionised the development of (learner) dictionaries and (many) reference grammars (see 1.8), textbook publishers have seemingly been much slower to follow this trend. That so few textbook publishers have latched onto the potential of corpus linguistics over the past three decades may seem particularly surprising given that corpora and corpus tools are more accessible than ever. However, Nelson (2022) notes that corpora are scarcely mentioned in reviews of ELT materials development such as Tomlinson (2008; 2012; 2013a) and Garton & Graves (2014; Graves & Garton 2019). By the same token, Meunier & Reppen’s (2015: 501) encouraging report that “there has been a significant increase in corpus-informed teaching materials” cannot be confirmed for the European school EFL textbook industry. Whilst some of the large Anglo-Saxon publishing houses operating on the global (mostly adult) EFL/ESL market have invested in their own corpus resources and expertise and now advertise many of their products as “corpus-informed” (see 1.8), only one series of the TEC (English in Mind for Spanish Speakers, Cambridge University Press) explicitly states that it incorporates insights from (in this case, learner) corpus data:

'Get it right!' section based on information from the unique Cambridge Learner Corpus tackle problem areas common to learners of each level.

(https://www.cambridge.org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog/secondary/english-mind-2nd-edition, accessed 25 Jan. 2022)
At the turn of the millennium, Conrad (2000: 549) prophesised that corpus-based descriptions of language had “the potential to revolutionize the teaching of grammar” but, for this to happen, she highlighted the crucial role of materials designers (Conrad 2000: 557). As we have seen, in secondary school EFL materials design, the “corpus revolution” has yet to materialise in any significant way. As briefly outlined in 1.7, the school EFL textbook industry operates under very (national and regional) specific constraints and, as a result of these many constraints, is known to be particularly resistant to change.

In advocating for the use of corpora in materials design, there is sometimes a misconception that corpus linguists believe that frequency of use should override all other considerations. This assumption is misguided on several grounds. For a start, corpus linguistics necessarily involves a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses (Bennett 2010: 7). Hence, when selecting the items to be included in pedagogical materials, textbook authors and editors cannot rely on frequency as the sole criterion. They will also need to consider additional factors such as salience, contingency, range, teachability, learnability, etc. (see, e.g., Ellis 2002; 2006; 2008). In other words, whilst corpora can provide valuable frequency-based information that is not accessible to (even native speaker) intuition, these quantitative statistical results need to be complemented with qualitative analyses. Making the same argument, McCarthy & Carter (2001: 338) assert that: “corpora can afford considerable benefits for classroom teaching, but the pedagogic process should be informed by the corpus, not driven or controlled by it.” Nonetheless, the present author agrees with Biber & Conrad (2001: 335) that:

[i]n the absence of other compelling factors (e.g., learnability at a given stage or basic knowledge required as a building block for later instruction), [...] dramatic differences in frequency should be among the most important factors influencing pedagogical decisions.

In the context of secondary school textbooks designed for national markets, factors that are specific to certain L1s (i.e., ‘learnability’) can arguably best be teased out on the basis of learner corpus data (see, e.g., Granger 2015) and/or of contrastive analyses of L1 and L2 corpus data (see, e.g., Valero Garcés 1998). Seven of the nine textbook series in the TEC were specifically targeted at learners with a common L1/school language. Yet, echoing Granger’s (2015: 494) observations that learner corpora’s impact on textbooks has so far been more “more nominal than real”, remarkably little contrastive metalinguistic information was provided by these textbooks. This seems like a missed opportunity since much research has confirmed that progress in L2 learning involves complex interactions between general language developmental processes and L1 constraints (e.g., Madlener 2018; Spada & Lightbown 1999). Corpus-based contrastive L1–L2 research and the findings of learner corpus research can provide textbook authors and editors with “information essential to producing customised syllabi applicable to teaching L2 learners of specific mother tongues” (Liu & Shaw 2001: 189). For instance, Winter & Le Foll (forthcoming)
sketch out ideas for such corpus-informed, register-sensitive and L1-specific
"customised syllabi" with respect to the teaching of *if*-conditionals at lower secondary
school level.

In sum, materials development can be both directly informed by the results of corpus
queries formulated by the materials designers themselves and indirectly by
incorporating the results of corpus linguistic research into the design process. Meunier
& Reppen (2015: 501) list the following ways in which corpora can inform materials
design:

* in helping select the linguistic target features (e.g. vocabulary, lexicogrammar; grammar);

* the amount of space in the text devoted to the features;

* in the sequencing of materials;

* through the inclusion of actual corpus data (e.g. lists of vocabulary or common lexico-grammar patterns);

* through the inclusion of information on register differences (e.g. conversation and academic prose);

* in the selection of the texts used in examples (e.g. do the texts accurately reflect the use of the target feature?).

Note that the penultimate bullet point refers specifically to the kind of register
approach advocated for in 8.2.3, thus reiterating the major role that corpora and
corpus tools can play in helping materials developers to promote register awareness
in EFL teaching and learning.

Another idea, not touched upon in Meunier & Reppen's (2015: 501) summary, goes
beyond the language featured in textbooks. It concerns the learning activities that
textbooks propose. Though calls to incorporate corpus-based data-driven learning
activities in the EFL/ESL classroom date back to the 1980s (e.g., Johns 1986), in
secondary school contexts in particular, they remain an absolute exception (see, e.g.,
Chambers 2019; Boulton & Vyatkina 2020). The norm, as we have seen in 1.7, is for
lower secondary school EFL teachers to largely follow the structure and activities of
the textbook and since very few publishing houses have yet dared to include hands-
on data-driven learning activities in their materials, only very few students
(presumably those with particularly dedicated teachers who have attended at least
one university seminar or continuous professional development course on corpus
linguistics) benefit from these kinds of activities. Given that we know that learners
already use an array of online resources to solve language issues, it would be wise for
textbooks to include activities that guide students towards more trustworthy sources
than they tend to choose (including, but not limited to, web-based corpus tools),
teach them efficient and effective querying methods, as well as the necessary
interpretative skills to make the best use of these resources (see Gilquin & Laporte
2021; Le Foll 2018b).
## 8.3 Limitations and methodological implications

In addition to the pedagogical implications discussed above, a number of methodological implications also arise from the present study. Each of the four analysis chapters (Ch. 4–7) concluded with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the diverse corpus-linguistic methods employed. This section brings the most relevant aspects together to outline the present study’s key methodological implications.

As with most corpus-based studies, arguably the most fundamental limitation concerns the representativeness of the corpus data from which conclusions were drawn and thus lies within the design of the corpora themselves. The decision-making processes that informed the design and compilation of both the TEC and the reference corpora were outlined in 3.3. As explained in 3.3.1.1, attempts were made to ensure that the selection of textbooks included in the TEC would be as representative as possible of the body of EFL textbooks currently<fnref n="62" /> used at lower secondary school level in France, Germany and Spain. Similarly, considerable efforts were deployed to ensure that the three reference corpora used for comparisons with the Conversation, Fiction and Informative subcorpora of the TEC were carefully chosen/compiled to reflect as accurately as possible the kind of target language teenage EFL learners can be expected to aspire to interact with (see 3.3.2). However, given the lack of publicly available textbook sales figures and in light of other practical constraints, some convenience and/or arbitrary choices were undoubtedly made. As with all corpus studies, generalisability of the results beyond the corpus sample(s) analysed should not be assumed. For now, we cannot tell whether the results of the present study will generalise to other secondary school EFL textbooks used in France, Germany and Spain, let alone to textbooks designed for entirely different education systems and/or produced by very different textbook publishing cultures. That said, to the author’s best knowledge, the TEC is the largest and most diverse corpus of contemporary secondary school EFL textbooks to date. It is also the only one to be entirely annotated for register. This is particularly important given that this study has demonstrated, across all four analysis chapters, that register is a major vector of language variation within textbooks and must therefore be accounted for when describing and/or evaluating Textbook English.

Another limitation common to most corpus-based studies resides in the fact that automated corpus queries are never 100% accurate. This being true, the present study reports on formal assessments of the accuracy of both the CQL queries used to query the corpora as tagged and lemmatised by Sketch Engine (in Chapters 4 and 5) and of the output of the MFTE (see 7.2.3). Moreover, inter-rater agreement scores were

<footnote n="62">⁶² Or, rather, at the time of data collection in 2016–2017 (see 3.3.1.1).</footnote>
computed as a means of assessing the reliability of the manual annotation schemes
used in Chapters 3, 4 and 5.

As suggested in 7.4, the register annotation scheme of the TEC (outlined in 3.3.1.4)
could be further developed – for instance by subdividing the Conversation category
into ‘private’ and ‘public’ (e.g., broadcast) situational contexts. This would allow for
additional comparisons with a corpus of TV and radio language for the ‘public
conversation’ register, whilst the Spoken BNC2014 would only be used as a
comparison benchmark for ‘private conversation’. As a further improvement, the
author would recommend that future endeavours to compile textbook corpora include
additional XML tags that reflect the structure and layout of the textbooks. The
simple mark-up scheme devised for the TEC only included a header with metadata
on each textbook volume (see 3.3.1.3); however, provided there are enough resources
for this additional manual annotation workload, it would also be worthwhile adding
mark-up tags defining each textbook page, lesson unit and chapter. For the present
study, this would have greatly facilitated the process of collating short textbook texts
into meaningful units (e.g., in preparation for the MDAs, see 6.2.2). In future projects,
it would allow for more fine-grained evaluations of textbooks’ intended developmental
linguistic progressions.

A further methodological takeaway message from the present study concerns the need
to combine different (corpus-linguistic) methods to arrive at more robust answers.
For instance, in Chapter 4, constructional analysis (see 4.2.3), correspondence
analysis (see 4.2.4) and qualitative analyses of concordance lines and entire texts were
combined to better grasp the similarities and differences in the verbs and semantic
fields associated with the progressive in Textbook Conversation and Textbook Fiction
as compared to the Spoken BNC2014 and the Youth Fiction corpus. A further
example can be found in the case-study chapter of representations of the verb MAKE
(Chapter 5) which demonstrated how one can arrive at different conclusions
depending on the baseline used to calculate relative feature frequencies. The use of
linguistically meaningful baselines was also one of the key features of the revised MDA
framework outlined and implemented in Chapter 7 (see 7.2.4).

Methodological issues specific to comparisons of textbook language with that of
naturally occurring registers have also been highlighted. Solutions to overcome issues
related to the comparison of texts of vastly different lengths (see 6.2.2), the lack of
punctuation in the transcriptions scheme of the Spoken BNC2014 (see 7.2.2) and the
non-independence of texts from the same textbook series, web domain or novel (see
6.2.6) were discussed and implemented. The latter issue was solved by modelling these
effects as random intercepts (and, whenever meaningful, also as random slopes, see
6.2.6) in mixed-effects models. In both Chapters 6 and 7, such models proved very
useful to identify and quantify additional factors of linguistic variation, such as the
textbooks' target proficiency levels, series and countries of publication/use, and their interactions (see 6.3 and 7.3).

Both Chapters 6 and 7 confirmed that MDA (Biber 1988; 1995; Berber Sardinha & Veirano Pinto 2019) is a powerful framework with which Textbook English can successfully be described and compared to naturally occurring, ‘real-life’ English across several dimensions of linguistic variation. Using an unsupervised method meant that the texts of the TEC were not presumed to be linguistically different from those of the reference target language corpora: the models that emerged from these principal component analyses (PCAs), however, highlighted a number of pedagogically relevant discrepancies.

Whilst MDA is a dimension-reduction method that simplifies large correlation matrices of feature frequencies, it is also fair to say that, in terms of its implementation, it is a complex method. McEnery & Hardie (2011: 111) postulate that, in addition to replicability concerns, it is this complexity that “has inhibited the widespread uptake of what appears to be a useful technique”. To a certain extent, both replicability and complexity concerns have been alleviated since Andrea Nini made the MAT (Nini 2014; 2019) available to the wider research community. As explained in 6.5, the GUI version of the MAT makes the method described in Chapter 6 accessible to researchers and materials developers with no coding experience. For this reason alone, additive MDA based on Biber’s (1988) model of General Spoken and Written English, as implemented in Chapter 6, is worth considering for applied purposes such as textbook evaluation and/or preliminary linguistic explorations of Textbook English. That said, Section 6.5 also pointed to a number of limitations of additive MDA based on Biber (1988) for the study of school EFL textbooks, which led to the elaboration of the revised framework outlined in Chapter 7. In 7.4, it was argued that this framework is in fact easier to implement than the traditional Biberian framework. Furthermore, considerable efforts were deployed to make the method as accessible as possible by publishing the source code and full documentation for the tagger used in the analyses (the MFTE; Le Foll 2021a; 2021e), as well as the full analysis code for the PCA, its many visualisations and the statistical modelling of the dimension scores (see *Online Appendix 7.2*) – all of which were conducted in the open-source programming environment R (R Core Team 2020). As a result, it is hoped that the present study may serve as a springboard for future corpus-based research in textbook language description and evaluation and, more generally, for further methodological advances in multivariable corpus analysis.

The methodological framework outlined in Chapter 7 was shown to yield robust results that were successfully replicated over various (random and non-random) subsets of the data (see 7.4). As stated in 3.2.2, the full publication of the code and (copyright permitting) data used to run the analyses presented in this study paves
the way for additional, independent replications. Regrettably, this practice is
currently far from the norm in (corpus) linguistics. It is therefore also hoped that this
study may serve as a showcase for future studies by exemplifying how corpus-
linguistic research can be made more transparent, reproducible and replicable.

8.4 Future research avenues

The present study is exploratory in nature. It opens many avenues for future research. Methodologically, it has shown how Textbook English may be examined across a broad range of different linguistic features both as a variety of English in its own right and in comparison to target reference varieties. It could be expanded by exploring the language of EFL textbooks and of other pedagogical materials, e.g., of online e-learning courses, used in different educational systems and at different levels.

Given that the present study has focused on frequent lexico-grammatical features,
another avenue to be explored in future research focuses on the lexical input provided
by EFL textbooks. For each textbook volume and series, the featured word and
phraseme types can be extracted and their rates of repetition across each textbook
volume and series can be calculated. The lexical input of the 42 textbook volumes
and nine textbook series of the TEC may then be compared to examine the extent to
which they present a common European core EFL lexical syllabus. In addition, the
textbooks' lexical range can be compared to corpus-based lists such as the new
General Service List (Brezina & Gablasova 2015) and the PHRASE List (Martinez
& Schmitt 2012). Given the TEC's register annotation, it will also be possible to
compare the phrasemes of the Conversation subcorpus of the TEC with the corpus-
derived lists of the most frequent phrasemes in British and American spoken English
(Fankhauser in preparation).

Needless to say, the revised MDA framework presented in 7.2 could also be applied
to analyses of secondary school textbooks of other languages. It would be interesting
to compare the present multi-dimensional models of Textbook English with those of
other "textbook languages". Such comparisons might reveal that some of the observed
characteristics of Textbook English are in fact universal features of what we might
then call: "Textbook Language".

The present study has focused exclusively on the linguistic contents of EFL textbooks
and can therefore only speculate as to their impact in and outside the EFL classroom.
As vividly put by Cook (2002: 268),

[i]t may be better to teach people how to draw with idealised squares and triangles than
with idiosyncratic human faces. Or it may not. The job of applied linguists is to present
evidence to demonstrate the learning basis for their claims [...].
Indeed, and as made clear in 1.7, textbooks do not exist in a vacuum. Much research remains to be done on how teachers and students use textbooks in the classroom. Surprisingly few empirical studies have looked into how textbooks – i.e., not only their language, but also their structures, tasks and activities – mediate classroom interactions and learning outcomes (Rösler & Schart 2016: 490). Empirical data on the *status quo* in secondary EFL classrooms is urgently needed to understand the real impact of textbooks and subsequently develop research-informed pre- and in-service teacher training courses that address current problems and genuinely meet teachers’ and learners’ needs (see 8.2.4).

In addition to classroom-based investigations into textbook use, the results of the present study and follow-up corpus-based textbook language studies may be triangulated with findings from learner corpora to gain new insights into L2 learning processes. As early as 1998, McEnery and Kifle postulated that “[w]here textbooks are included in an exploration of L2 learning, they can explain differences between NS [native speaker] and NNS [non-native speaker] usage” (as cited in Tono 2004: 52). In this context, robust models of textbook language are potentially very useful because few large-scale research projects will realistically be able to investigate both the language of the textbooks that learners use and the language production of these same learners (though see Möller 2020 for such a research design). The hope is that, if the models of Textbook English presented in 7.3 are shown to be generalisable to further EFL textbooks, they may be used as a means of better understanding certain usage patterns that are more frequent in the language of instructed EFL learners than in that of naturalistic ESL learners (for first attempts in this direction, see Winter & Le Foll forthcoming on EFL learners’ use of *if*-conditionals and; and Le Foll forthcoming on periphrastic causative constructions).

## 8.5 Conclusion

This study has provided a systematic empirical account of the relationship between English as it is presented to secondary school EFL learners and English outside the classroom. It has sought to provide what is likely, to date, the most comprehensive description of Textbook English as a distinct variety of English. Central to the thesis of this study is the notion of register. Indeed, throughout its diverse yet converging analyses, the present study has demonstrated that Textbook English cannot be adequately described without taking account of situationally determined linguistic variation. Whilst surprisingly few significant differences between the language of EFL textbooks used in secondary schools in France, Germany and Spain, or between that of the nine different textbook series of the TEC were observed, this study uncovered compelling interactions between text register and the target proficiency levels of the textbooks under study. The clusters of linguistic features responsible for these interactions were closely examined. Additionally, this study illustrated and explained
the key linguistic differences that define stereotypically textbook-like texts as opposed
to situationally similar, ‘real-life’ texts.

Corroborating the findings of previous Textbook English studies, notably Mindt
(1987; 1992; 1995b) and Römer (2004b; 2005), the present study identified a
disconcerting gap between conversational English as it is presented in contemporary
secondary school EFL textbooks and real-life conversation outside the classroom. In
addition, it demonstrated that some representations of informative texts are
potentially also problematic. Thus, the results of the present study reiterate a plea
formulated decades earlier by, among others, Mindt (1996: 247) to: "bring textbooks
for teaching English as a foreign language into closer correspondence with actual
English". Since then, a large body of evidence from usage-based linguistic studies and
related disciplines has consistently highlighted the strong connection between input
exposure and L2 learners' developmental patterns (e.g., Achard & Niemeier 2004;
Pérez-Paredes, Mark & O'Keeffe 2020; Tyler 2012; Tyler, Ortega & Uno 2018). Thus,
more than ever, it makes sense to advocate for the design of "materials that reflect
natural or authentic patterns of use" (Gurzynski-Weiss et al. 2018: 306) in order to
improve the relevance and effectiveness of school EFL teaching materials.

Sections 8.2.1 and 8.2.2 illustrated concrete, practical ways in which authentic materials could be sourced and adapted for the EFL classroom with the use of freely available corpora and corpus tools. In 8.2.3, it has been argued that the use of materials that reflects naturally occurring English entails adopting a register approach to ELT that exposes learners to lexico-grammatical patterns of use in the form of situationally contextualised, meaningful constructions. Sections 8.2.4 and 8.2.5 spelt out the implications of such a register approach for teacher education and materials design. In addition to using a broad range of corpus-linguistic methods as descriptive and diagnostic tools in the four analysis chapters, this final chapter has underlined the essential role of corpus linguistics in guiding target language features, text choice and task design decisions in the development of new ELT materials.

In sum, the present pedagogically-driven corpus-based study has shown how corpus-
linguistic methods can be used, on the one hand, to describe the language of textbooks
from multiple perspectives and identify potential problems and, on the other, to
propose solutions to improve future teaching materials by showing teachers and
materials designers how freely available corpus resources and tools can be used to
create and curate "meaningful content-rich contexts for language learning" (Pérez-
Paredes, Mark & O'Keeffe 2020: 13). Hence, methodologically, the present study can
be said to have "corpused" full circle.
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