Exploring the Registers of School EFL Textbooks with Multidimensional Analysis: Elen Le Foll ICAME41
Channel: Elen Le Foll
Date: 2020-05-20

Presentation recorded for the ICAME41: https://icame41.as.uni-heidelberg.de/

This study aims to uncover the specific combinations of lexico-grammatical features that characterise “the kind of synthetic English” (Römer 2004: 185) that pupils are exposed to via their school textbooks.

To this end, a Textbook English corpus made up of 43 coursebooks used in lower secondary schools in France, Germany and Spain is mobilised. The corpus was manually annotated for following major textbook registers: Conversation (including the transcripts of the accompanying audio and video materials), Personal Communication, Informative texts, Song & Poetry, Fiction, and Instructions & Explanations.

First, a Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA; Biber 1988; Sardinha & Pinto 2014; 2019) of these six textbook registers is conducted with the aim of capturing the full range of Textbook English register variation. Methodological issues including text length, the choice of tagger (an adapted version of the MAT, Nini 2019) and statistical considerations are discussed.

The factors extracted are then functionally interpreted and the resulting model of School EFL Textbook English is compared to Biber's (1998) six dimensions of adult native speaker English, Reppen's (2001) model of American English elementary school student language and Biber’s (2006) dimensions of University English. Preliminary results suggest that, apart from the instructional texts, textbook registers display comparatively little register-based variation.

Second, an “additive MDA” (Sardinha et al. 2019) is carried out with the aim of mapping out textbook registers against Biber’s (1988) model as a “base-rate knowledge of English register” (Nini 2019: 70). To boost comparability, two custom- made corpora of Youth Fiction and Informative Texts for Teens, as well as the Spoken BNC2014 (Love et al. 2017) are also tagged, analysed and mapped onto Biber’s (1998) dimensions following the same procedure as for the textbook register subcorpora. Among other findings, it transpires that textbook dialogues underrepresent many of the typical features of spontaneous conversation.


Keywords: Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Additive MDA, Register variation, Factor Analysis, Textbooks, Coursebooks, Language Teaching Materials, English as a Foreign Language.