Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching (JLLT)

A Frequency Analysis of Vocabulary Words

in University Textbooks of French

Jennifer Wagner (Clio (MI), USA)

Abstract (English)

Frequency as a principle for vocabulary selection is now commonly used in the creation of English textbooks; however, it is unclear whether frequency has played a role in the creation of French textbooks. In this study, the vocabulary of twelve first-year and six second-year university textbooks published in the United States was compared to a frequency dictionary of contemporary French. The analysis yielded how many high frequency words were found in the textbooks, in addition to which high frequency words were excluded from the textbooks and which low frequency words were included in the textbooks. The results indicate that the textbooks did not provide enough high frequency words needed for basic communication in French.

Keywords: Language materials design, vocabulary acquisition, textbooks, language pedagogy

Abstract (français)

La fréquence comme principe pour la sélection du vocabulaire est utilisée dans la création des manuels scolaires de langue anglaise. Cependant, il reste à savoir si la fréquence a joué un rôle dans la création des manuels scolaires de langue française. Dans cette étude, le vocabulaire de douze manuels scolaires de première année et de six manuels scolaires de deuxième année publiés aux États-Unis a été comparé à un dictionnaire de fréquence de français contemporain. L’analyse donne le nombre de mots de haute fréquence qui se trouvent dans les manuels scolaires, en plus des mots de haute fréquence qui ne s’y trouvent pas ainsi que les mots de basse fréquence qui s’y trouvent. Les résultats démontrent que les manuels scolaires n’offrent pas assez de mots de haute fréquence nécessaires pour la communication de base en français.

Mots-clé: Conception des manuels de langue, acquisition du vocabulaire, manuels scolaires, didactique des langues

1 Introduction

1.1 Frequency in Language Pedagogy

Research on vocabulary in language learning and teaching often supports the notion that frequency is a useful guide for vocabulary selection and sequencing in materials design (Nation & Macalister 2010). Schmitt (2008) and Horst (2013) also stress the significance of the frequency status of words in vocabulary learning with an argument for restructuring language pedagogy to include the most frequent words at the beginning stages of study. Frequency is not the only principle to be considered for vocabulary selection, but it is a crucial aspect with which to begin the selection process.

With the availability of large representative corpora and tools to analyze the texts contained within them, obtaining frequency data on individual words has become increasingly easier and faster. This use of corpora to determine frequency has the additional benefit of being more objective than a native speaker’s or teacher’s intuition, which can be unreliable (Biber et al. 1998, Hunston 2002) and inadequate for determining frequency when used alone (McCrostie 2007).

The use of corpora has also facilitated research on the number of frequent words needed to comprehend the majority of a written or spoken text. It has been determined that the most frequent 2,000 words account for 80% of language use (Meara 1995, Nation 2001), and many researchers advocate for the explicit teaching of these high frequency words at the beginning level of language study study (Nation 2001, Nation & Meara 2002, Schmitt 2000).

Additionally, Cobb & Horst (2004) concluded that the 2,000 most frequent word families of French offer coverage of about 85% of an average text, while Cobb (2014), more recently, adopted corpus-based tools developed for use in analysing English to the French language and found that the top 2,000 words allow 92% of lexical coverage. These higher percentages for the French language (as compared to those for English) indicate that learning the 2,000 most frequent words is even more useful for learners of French than for learners of English.

In environments in which there is minimal exposure to the target language outside of the classroom, as is the case for most students learning French in the United States, the textbook often serves as the sole source of input for the vocabulary that students learn. The textbook also creates the syllabus for the entire language course and determines what is deliberately taught in the classroom(Byrnes 1988, Richards 1993). Therefore, it will be useful to establish how many and which high frequency words actually appear in textbooks, given the necessity of this vocabulary for beginning learners, which first-year or introductory textbooks are intended to encompass.

1.2 Frequency Lists of French Vocabulary

In order to determine the concrete number of high frequency words that are included in French textbooks, a frequency list of French words is necessary for the comparison. Using corpora rather than intuition to create frequency lists of English words, has become rather common over the past two decades, yet corpus-based approaches to frequency in other languages, including French, have remained scarce until relatively recently. Although a few textbooks which claim to provide the most useful or essential words in French are currently available (6000+ Essential French Words (2004), Kurgebov (2006), McCoy (2011)), none of the authors provide any justification on how the usefulness of these words was determined.

In contrast, A Frequency Dictionary of French: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Lonsdale & Le Bras 2009), which features the top 5,000 most frequently used words of French, was created from a corpus of 23 million words of spoken and written French covering various genres and registers. The corpus contains 11.5 million words from interviews, conversations, theatre dialogues, parliamentary debates, and film subtitles in the spoken portion as well as 11.5 million words from newspaper and magazine articles, fiction and non-fiction literature, newsletters, tech reports and user manuals in the written portion. In addition, none of the texts date from before 1950 so as to provide a modern representation of the French language.

Although other corpora of French may be larger, such as ARTFL-FRANTEXT (150 million words of prose and poetry from the 17^th to 20^th centuries) or EUROPARL (54 million words of the proceedings of the European Parliament), these corpora are restricted to either spoken or written language and consist of fewer genres and registers. The corpus from which A Frequency Dictionary of French was created is the largest corpus to include both spoken and written language in equal amounts across a variety of genres and registers¹. For these reasons, it is a useful tool with which to examine the vocabulary coverage of French textbooks in a more objective manner by comparing word lists.

1.3 Rationale for the Current Study

The usefulness of the language provided in French textbooks has been the subject of several studies, but this research has largely focused on certain grammatical features present in the textbooks rather than the overall vocabulary (Etienne & Sax 2009, Fonseca-Greber & Waugh 2003, Herschensohn 1988, O'Connor Di Vito 1991, 1992). While there have been recent studies on high frequency vocabulary in English textbooks (Eldridge & Neufeld 2009, Matsuoka & Hirsh 2010, O’Loughlin 2012), as well as Spanish (Davies & Face 2006, Godev 2009) and German textbooks (Lipinksi 2010), no analysis has been carried out on the vocabulary coverage of French textbooks.

Furthermore, no study has examined the combined vocabulary coverage of first-year textbooks used in conjunction with second-year textbooks in order to determine the amount of vocabulary offered over a two-year course of French at the tertiary level². Therefore, the present study aims to address this gap by providing an analysis of the vocabulary found in first- and second-year French textbooks designed for university study.

2 Material and Methods

The present study is a quantitative analysis of the vocabulary of university textbooks of French with a comparison to the top 2,000 entries in A Frequency Dictionary of French: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Lonsdale & Le Bras 2009), since high frequency vocabulary consists of 2,000 words (Meara 1995, Nation 2001) and can account for 85 to 92% of lexical coverage of a French text (Cobb 2014, Cobb & Horst 2004). The methodology is similar to that of Davies & Face (2006) and Godev (2009), who used A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Davies 2006) in their comparisons to vocabulary lists of first-year Spanish textbooks.

Additionally, the current study includes an analysis of the vocabulary offered by first-year and second-year textbooks used together over a two-year course rather than only individually for each year level. For the purposes of this study, high frequency vocabulary refers to entries 1 to 2,000 of A Frequency Dictionary of French, and low frequency vocabulary refers to words that are not included in the top 2,000 entries of the frequency dictionary.

2.1 Textbook Selection

The textbooks selected for this study include twelve first-year and six second-year textbooks published in the United States between 2009 and 2013. The first-year textbooks are introductory ones, designed for the beginning level, and assume no prior knowledge of French. The second-year textbooks analysed are designed for the intermediate level and assume some prior knowledge of French, i.e. the vocabulary and grammar found in first-year textbooks. Second-year textbooks review some of the materials from the first-year textbooks while also providing new materials. These first- and second-year textbooks generally form the curriculum for the first two years of French studies at American universities, with the intention of preparing students for more advanced conversation, composition and literature courses in the third and fourth years of a Bachelor’s degree.

2.2 Vocabulary

The active vocabulary of each textbook was included for analysis. According to Davies & Face,“active vocabulary is the vocabulary that students are expected to learn and be able to use, and is generally the vocabulary included in the end of chapter vocabulary lists” (Davies & Face: 2006: 135) as well as the words that are the focus of the vocabulary activities within the respective chapter. Passive vocabulary, on the other hand, most often tends to appear in reading passages, and students are not required to learn these words for productive purposes.

The end-of-chapter vocabulary lists were lemmatised according to the same specifications used by Lonsdale & Le Bras in creation of A Frequency Dictionary of French. Base forms of each word were found by reducing plural nouns to the singular, verb conjugations to the infinitive, and inflected adjectives to the masculine singular form. Any repetitions in the vocabulary lists for each year level were deleted to find the overall number of types rather than tokens that appear in each textbook. Repetitions between first- and second-year textbooks were not deleted in order to determine how much of the vocabulary found in first-year textbooks was repeated in the second-year textbooks analysed.

2.3 Analysis

To determine the number of frequency dictionary entries found in the vocabulary lists of each textbook, each vocabulary list was compared to entries 1 to 2,000 of the frequency dictionary, using the text comparison tool, Text Lex Compare, which is part of Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor website (n.d.). These comparisons yielded an answer to the question of how many high frequency words were included in the first-year textbooks, second-year textbooks, and first-year plus second-year textbooks used together as a two year course of French. Additionally, the comparisons yielded which high frequency words were excluded from the textbooks and which low frequency words were included in the textbooks.

High frequency words that were excluded from the textbooks were sorted according to their frequency rank as indicated in the dictionary, for both first- and second-year textbooks. Low frequency words included in the textbooks were sorted according to which words appeared in all twelve of the first-year textbooks and all six of the second-year textbooks..

3    Results

3.1 Number of Total Words and High Frequency Words in Textbooks

Table 1 shows the total number of words included in each first- and second-year textbook, as well as the number and percentage of high frequency words included in the textbooks. The total number of words included in the textbooks ranged from 938 to 2,363 for first-year textbooks and 633 to 1,818 for second-year textbooks. On an average, first-year textbooks included 1,486 words, while second-year textbooks included 1,077 words.

The number of high frequency words found in first-year textbooks ranged from 515 to 947 with an average of 693 words. For second-year textbooks, the number of high frequency words ranged from 267 to 646 with an average of 426 words. Therefore, only 48% of first-year textbook vocabulary and 41% of second-year textbook vocabulary consist of high frequency words.

For both first- and second-year textbooks, the rate of inclusion of high frequency words is less than half of what researchers recommend. This also means that more than half the words included in the textbooks are low frequency words, which Nation & Macalister (2010: 41) argue “should be dealt with only when the high-frequency words have been sufficiently learned.”

First-Year Textbooks	Words Total	High Freqency Words	High Frequency Words (in 5
Entre Amis	1173	614	52.3%
Voilà	938	553	59.00%
Mais Oui	1352	705	52.10%
Liaisons	1892	756	40.00%
Chez Nous	1690	735	43.50%
Deux Mondes	2363	947	40.10%
Vis-à-Vis	1379	717	52.00%
En Avant	1443	662	45.90%
Français-Monde	1089	515	47.30%
Contacts	1405	733	52.20%
Espaces	1762	832	47.20%
À Vous	1347	555	41.20%
Averages:	1486	693	47.70%
Second-Year Textbooks	Words Total	High Frequency Words	High Frequency Words (in %)
Quant à moi	1818	646	35.50%
Séquences	1204	462	38.40%
Intrigue	904	267	29.50%
Interaction	733	303	41.30%
Bravo	1167	533	45.70%
Personnages	633	342	54.00%
Averages:	1077	426	40.70%

Table 1: Total and High Frequency Vocabulary Coverage in First-Year and Second-Year Textbooks

The figures in Table 1 indicate that neither first- nor second-year textbooks alone offer 2,000 words (with the exception of Deux Mondes). Therefore it is important to consider the vocabulary coverage of first- and second-year textbooks used together over a two-year course rather than in isolation. Comparing the vocabulary in first-year textbooks to the vocabulary in second-year textbooks reveals how many words were shared between the two levels, or how many words are repeated in the second-year textbooks. However, first- and second-year textbooks are created independently of each other, meaning none of the second-year textbooks is designed as a companion to a specific first-year textbook. Therefore, one first-year textbooks and one second-year textbooks were chosen randomly for the comparison.

Table 2 shows these figures for the total number of words shared between two textbooks as well as the high frequency words shared between the textbooks. Second-year textbooks repeated an average of 414 words from the total vocabulary of first-year textbooks, and 229 words from the high frequency vocabulary of first-year textbooks.

First- and Second-Year Textbooks	Total Words Shared	High-Frequency Words Shared
Entre Amis + Bravo	375	256
Mais Oui + Interaction	256	156
Liaisons + Quant à moi	730	384
Chez Nous + Intrigue	369	128
En Avant + Séquences	343	222
Average:	414	229

Table 2: Number of Total Words and High-Frequency Words Shared between First-and Second-Year Textbooks

If the average number of shared high frequency words between first- and second-year textbooks (229) is subtracted from the average number of high frequency words offered by the second-year textbooks (426; see Table 1), the result is 197 high frequency words. This result reveals that second-year textbooks repeat slightly more high frequency words from first-year textbooks than they introduce new high frequency words that were not offered in the first-year textbooks.

Adding the number of words offered by each textbook and subtracting the number of shared words between the two levels determines the number of total words as well as high frequency words offered by a two-year course of French. For example, supposing that the first-year textbook Entre Amis and the second-year textbook Bravo are used for a two-year course of French, the total number of unique words offered is 1,965, which was found by subtracting the number of shared words from the sum of the total number of words of each textbook (1,173 + 1,167 – 375).

First- and Second- Year Textbooks	# Words total	# High Frequency Words	% High Frequency Words
Entre Amis + Bravo	1965	891	45.30%
Mais Oui + Interaction	1829	852	46.60%
Liaisons + Quant à moi	2980	1018	34.20%
Chez Nous + Intrigue	2225	874	39.30%
En Avant + Séquences	2305	903	39.20%
Averages:	2261	908	41%

Table 3: Total and High Frequency Vocabulary Coverage Over a Two-Year Course of French

As shown in Table 3, the average number of total words offered by a two-year course of French is 2,261 words. This shows that a two-year course of French can indeed provide students with 2,000 words. Nevertheless, the average number of high frequency words offered by a two-year course of French is only 908 words, with about 700 high frequency words being offered in first year and an additional 200 high frequency words being offered in second year. About 200 high frequency words found in the first-year textbooks are also repeated in the second year textbooks.

The second-year textbooks neither compensate for the lack of high frequency words in first-year textbooks nor do they provide enough high frequency words missing from the first-year textbooks for students to advance to the next frequency band, as they offer even fewer high frequency words than the first-year textbooks. After two years of study intended to prepare students for the extensive reading required in upper level courses, students are exposed to less than half of the high frequency words. This is at odds with Nation & Macalister (2010) who argue that high frequency words should be given the most attention in language courses before dealing with low frequency words..

The results of the comparisons between textbook vocabulary and frequency dictionary yielded similar results for both year levels. Neither first- or second-year textbooks used individually nor a combination of first-year and second-year textbooks used over a two-year course offer students enough high frequency vocabulary words that are needed for basic communication. These results also reveal that frequency was not used as the guiding principle for vocabulary selection among these textbooks. In order to determine how the vocabulary was selected, the next section will focus on the high frequency words which were excluded from the textbooks as well as the low frequency words which were included in the textbooks.

3.2 High Frequency Words Excluded from Textbooks

A large number of high frequency words were found to be excluded from all of the eighteen textbooks. The number of high frequency words that were excluded from all of the first-year textbooks amounted to 516, and the number of high frequency words excluded from all of the second-year textbooks amounted to 755 words. The top 25 of these high frequency words from each year level are presented in Table 4 for both year levels, with their frequency rank from the dictionary.

First-Year Textbooks			Second-Year Textbooks
Abs. Freq.	Entry	Glossary	Abs. Freq.	Entry	Glossary
98	ainsi	thus	30	mais	but
142	tel	such	31	nous	we
166	soit	either…or	33	ou	or
223	situation	situation	34	si	if, yes
246	également	also	38	elle	she, her
262	mesure	measure	44	aussi	also
275	quant	as for	54	cela	that, it
315	intérêt	interest	73	notre	our
316	mener	to lead	74	dont	whose/which
318	détail	detail	76	an	year
319	appartenir	to belong to	79	monsieur	mister
324	concerner	to concern	89	pendant	during
346	atteindre	to reach	96	depuis	since
365	présence	presence	116	penser	to think
378	peuple	people	130	seulement	only
383	position	position	139	commencer	to begin
388	effort	effort	145	donc	therefore
391	tirer	to pull	147	général	general
395	juger	to judge	148	moment	moment
404	afin	in order to	160	gouvernement	government
405	peine	effort, trouble	161	eux	them
406	malgré	in spite of	162	devenir	to become
411	lors	at the time of	166	soit	either…or
414	voix	voice	171	nom	name
416	base	base	175	possible	possible

Table 4: Top 25 High Frequency Words Excluded from First- and Second-Year Textbooks

The words in Table 4 indicate that the textbooks tend to exclude high frequency vocabulary that represents abstract concepts, such as situation, intérêt, and peine. Many of these words are also complete or partial cognates with their English translations, which could explain why the authors did not include them. In addition, second-year textbooks exclude some high frequency words that were already included in first-year textbooks, such as subject pronouns (nous, elle) and coordinating conjunctions (mais, ou).

In addition, second-year textbooks exclude some high frequency words that the authors assumed were already included in first-year textbooks and did not need to be reviewed in second-year textbooks. This explains why extremely frequent words such as subject pronouns (nous, elle) and coordinating conjunctions (mais, ou) are not found in second-year textbooks, as it is doubtful that a student could pass a second-year French class without already knowing these frequent function words.

3.3 Low Frequency Words Included in Textbooks

In addition to the high frequency words excluded from the textbooks, it is important to look at the low frequency words that were included in the textbooks in order to determine how vocabulary was selected by the authors. Low frequency words found among all twelve first-year textbooks included 57 words. These words are presented in alphabetical order with their English translations in Table 5.

French	English Glossary	French	English Glossary
adorer	to adore	se laver	to get washed
s’amuser	to have fun	mademoiselle	miss
bain	bath	manteau	coat
beurre	butter	marron	chestnut, brown
chaise	chair	musée	museum
chaussure	shoe	neiger	to snow
chemise	shirt	nez	nose
cheveu	hair	oncle	uncle
costume	suit	orange	orange
se coucher	to go to bed	ordinateur	computer
cousin	cousin	pantalon	pants
cravate	tie	pleuvoir	to rain
cuisine	kitchen	portable	laptop, mobile
dent	tooth	poulet	chicken
se dépêcher	to hurry up	se réveiller	to wake up
détester	to hate	rose	rose, pink
dîner	dinner	salut	hi, bye
étage	floor	séjour	stay
glace	ice, ice cream	ski	ski
gorge	throat	soif	thirst
grand-mère	grandmother	tante	aunt
grand-père	grandfather	tarte	pie
ingénieur	engineer	tasse	cup
s’habiller	to get dressed	tennis	tennis
intelligent	intelligent	vélo	bike
jambe	leg	verre	glass
jambon	ham	vêtement	clothing
jean	jeans	voyager	to travel
jupe	skirt

Table 5: Low Frequency Words Included in All Twelve First-Year Textbooks

The fact that these low frequency words were included in all of the first year textbooks indicates that vocabulary selection was not actually based on frequency. Vocabulary selection was also not based on whether a word has an exact or close cognate with the English translation, as there are many cognates among the high frequency words excluded from the textbooks (as shown in Table 4) and the low frequency words included in the textbooks, such as cousin (cousin), dîner (dinner), jean (jeans), tennis (tennis), and ski (ski).

In contrast to the excluded high frequency words which represented abstract concepts, these low frequency words are examples of concrete concepts for which an image or picture can be included in the textbooks to illustrate their meanings. Yet, it was not the quality of being concrete or abstract that determined whether a word was included or excluded from the textbooks. Similar to what Davies & Face (2006: 142) found in their vocabulary analysis of Spanish textbooks, the topics chosen for each chapter largely determined the vocabulary of first-year textbooks. Low frequency words which represent concrete concepts tended to be included in the textbooks because they fit very well into the chapter topics, while high frequency words that represent abstract concepts were excluded because they do not.

The low frequency words can be sorted into distinct topics that are present in all of the first year textbooks. The table of contents of En Avant, for example, shows the topics which are quite common to all of the first-year textbooks, such as family, food, travel, clothing, house, and parts of the body. The textbook authors, therefore, provide words which can be categorized into these topics, regardless of the frequency status of these words.

Chapter	Topic
1	Alphabet, numbers, days and months
2	Personality and appearance
3	Daily activities
4	Family members and pets
5	Food stores and food items
6	Clothing and accessories
7	Entertainment and cultural events
8	Parts of the body
9	One's residence
10	Holidays and other celebrations
11	Life's major milestones
12	City living
13	Vacations and travel
14	A country's history and language(s)
15	France's social and environmental issues
16	The arts

Table 6: Table of contents of the textbook En Avant

Concerning second-year textbooks, there were two low frequency words found in all six textbooks: gratuit and loyer. In the majority (four out of six) of second-year textbooks, there were 15 low frequency words: animé, ça, canne, chèvre, colon, documentaire, épouvante, fac, intrigue, poire, poivron, salade, sous-titre, western, yaourt.

Six of these words refer to food, such as canne and chèvre which were often found in expressions such as canne à sucre and fromage de chèvre. Six of these words refer to films or genres of film, e.g. film d’épouvante. These categories are not surprising, considering the fact that many chapters of the second-year textbooks’ are organised around different regions of the French-speaking world instead of the same chapter topics found in first-year textbooks. The second-year themes tend to focus on the history of French colonisation in these Francophone areas as well as the food that is important or unique to each one of them, such as the sugar cane in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Using films to discover French and Francophone culture is also a common strategy of second-year textbooks, which is not found quite as often as in first-year textbooks.

The low frequency words found in second-year textbooks provide further support for the notion that frequency was not used to determine which words to include in the textbooks. Once again, the overall theme of the chapters - rather than frequency - determined which words were included.

4 Discussion

The frequency analysis showed that 48% of the vocabulary in first-year textbooks consisted of high frequency words, while 41% of the vocabulary in second-year textbooks consisted of high frequency words. However, once the vocabulary between first- and second-year textbooks was compared, it was revealed that roughly half of the high frequency words in second-year textbooks had already been introduced in the first-year textbooks. Therefore, the number of new high frequency words offered by the second-year textbooks is considerably lower than for first-year textbooks. These results show that neither year level, used alone or together over a two-year course, offered enough high frequency words to attain the goal of 2,000 words.

The low number of high frequency words in first- and-second year textbooks indicates that textbook authors did not take any frequency status into account when choosing vocabulary words, which Nation & Macalister (2010) stress as the most important criterion for vocabulary selection. Instead, the selection of vocabulary was driven by the respective chapter topics even though several studies indicate that presenting related words within semantic sets actually hinders rather than facilitates vocabulary acquisition. Tinkham (1993) found that semantically related words were more difficult to remember than unrelated words for English speakers. Tinkham’s study was replicated for Japanese speakers by Waring (1997), whose findings indicated “that the related words took significantly more time to learn than did the unrelated words” (Waring 1997: 267). Further studies by Finkbeiner & Nicol (2003) and Erten & Tekin (2008) showed similar results with the use of pictures with and without first-language translations of the words. A more recent study by Bolger & Zapata (2011) took a different approach by presenting words in stories rather than in lists. Even with the addition of context, their subjects “showed more difficulty in rejecting semantically related distractors” (Bolger & Zapata 2011: 633).

The results of these studies suggest that presenting “words in semantic sets creates competition between items, which in turn increases difficulty during learning and during memory retrieval in language production” (Finkbeiner & Nicol 2003: 379). According to Nation (2000), the most frequent words within a semantic set should be presented first, and once those words have been learned by students, the rest of the words can be introduced. Moreover, he maintains that “even if frequency is used only as a very rough guide to the sequencing of vocabulary in a course, it would lead to the separation of many members” (Nation 2000: 8) of those semantic sets.

Although using a given topic to guide vocabulary selection is not recommended, textbook authors do so because it seems logical to offer the complete lexical coverage of a certain topic at once (Nation 2000) and also because it is easier to design materials in this manner (Folse 2004). Walz takes a more extreme approach and insists that authors include certain words “simply because they exist and not because of any usefulness or frequency” (Walz 1986: 17). The goal of vocabulary selection in the textbooks analysed appears to be oriented towards the inclusion of as many words as possible so as to complete the respective chapter topic, rather than taking the most frequent, and therefore most useful, French words into account – which does not match the goals of the textbooks as stated in the introductions.

Many of the textbooks indicate that they offer a “communicative approach” or an “emphasis on communicative interactions” with a “functional / task-based syllabus.” The chapter topics integrate the functions, structures and vocabulary that seem directly related to each other, such as ordering at a café or restaurant, the partitive article, and types of food and drink (Chez Nous 2009: 305; Français-Monde 2010: 236) or describing daily routines, pronominal verbs, and parts of the body (Espaces 2011: 326; Vis-à-Vis 2011: 352).

An example from the textbook Entre Amis illustrates the use of functional phrases. In a chapter based on clothing, the question Qu’est-ce que vous portez en cours ? and the response Je porte... are introduced with several examples of types of clothing that are to be placed into the response. Therefore, the vocabulary was selected according to the overall topic of the chapter in addition to how well the words “fill in the slots” of the functional phrases (Folse 2004: 24). Rather than high frequency vocabulary being the focus of the chapter, it was a combination of the thematic orientation of the textbook chapter and the communicative or functional phrases that actually determined the organization of the textbook.

Two textbooks explicitly addressed the issue of frequency by claiming that “students are exposed to high-frequency expressions” (En Avant 2012: xviii) and “high-frequency vocabulary is introduced” (Espaces 2011: xiii) though no explanation for how these were determined to be high frequency was given. Several textbooks claim that the language provided within the different chapters reflects the way French is actually used today (Voilà 2010: xii, Vis-à-Vis 2011: xvii) and that students will be exposed to “real-world language” (Mais Oui 2013: xvii), “authentic language” (Chez Nous 2009: xi, Deux Mondes 2009: xiii, Français-Monde 2010: xiv), and “natural language use” (Français-Monde 2010: xv). If the textbooks are indeed offering authentic French, it would be expected that they would include the words that students are most likely to encounter in the real world. However, the results of this study suggest that frequency was not the main factor in vocabulary selection.

The fact that similar results were found for all of the textbooks also attests to the intuitive nature of materials design (Tomlinson 2013) as well as the publishing companies’ encouragement to produce textbooks which are very similar to textbooks already available on the market (Heilenman 1993). Furthermore, the results of this study are similar to what Davies & Face (2006), Godev (2009), and Lipinski (2010) found in their comparisons of Spanish and German textbook vocabulary with frequency dictionaries. Overall, the rationale for vocabulary selection among language textbooks appears to be classroom communication that is based on topics rather than real world communication that is based on frequency.

5 Conclusions

The present vocabulary analysis investigated the extent to which textbooks excluded the most frequently used words of French, and also identified which low frequency words were included in the textbooks. As illustrated by the results, neither first- nor second-year textbooks used alone or combined into a two year course offered an adequate coverage of high frequency words. It was found that the textbook vocabulary focused on words belonging to the chapter topic instead of those that occur most frequently in the French language, which does not respond to current research on the teaching of vocabulary.

More precisely, the demands of textbook design determined the choice of vocabulary which focuses on topic and functional phrases rather than frequency. Consequently, students will lose time learning low frequency words rather than being guided to the high frequency words that they are more likely to encounter in the real world, in order to have the vocabulary to do the pedagogical tasks in the textbook. This finding has several implications for materials designers who should strive to use corpora instead of intuition when selecting vocabulary words in order to meet the goals of the textbooks as expressed in the introductions. The results of this study also point to the need for teachers and students to supplement current textbooks with more high frequency vocabulary as determined by a representative corpus of French.

References

Primary Sources

First-Year Textbooks

À Vous (2012): Anover, V., & Antes, T. A. (2012). À Vous!: The Global French Experience (2^nd ed.). Boston: Cengage-Heinle.

Chez Nous (2009): Valdman, A., Pons, C., & Scullen, M. E. (2009). Chez Nous: Branché Sur Le Monde Francophone (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Contacts (2009): Valette, J.-P., & Valette, R. M. (2009). Contacts: Langue et culture françaises (8th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Deux Mondes (2009): Terrell, T. D., Rogers, M. B., Kerr, B. J., & Spielmann, G. (2009). Deux mondes: A communicative approach (6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

En Avant (2012): Anderson, B., Golato, P., & Blatty, S. A. (2012). En avant: Beginning French (1^st ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Entre Amis (2013): Oates, M., & Oukada, L. (2013). Entre Amis: An Interactive Approach (6th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Espaces (2011) : Mitschke, C., & Tano, S. (2011). Espaces: Rendez-vous avec le monde francophone (2^nd ed.). Boston: Vista Higher Learning.

Français-Monde (2010) : Ariew, R., & Dupuy, B. (2010). Français-Monde: Connectez-vous à la francophonie (1^st ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Liaisons (2013): Wong, W., Weber-Fever, S., Ousselin, E., & VanPatten, B. (2013). Liaisons: An Introduction to French (1^st ed.). Boston: Cengage-Heinle.

Mais Oui (2013): Thompson, C. P., & Phillips, E. M. (2013). Mais Oui!: Introductory French And Francophone Culture (5^th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Vis-à-Vis (2011): Amon, E., Muyskens, J. A., & Omaggio-Hadley, A. C. (2011). Vis-à-vis: Beginning French (5^th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Voilà (2010) : Heilenman, K., Kaplan, I., & Toussaint Tournier, C. (2010). Voilà! An introduction to French (6^th ed.). Boston: Thomson-Heinle.

Second-Year Textbooks

Bravo (2012): Muyskens, J., Harlow, L., Vialet, M., & Brière, J.-F. (2012). Bravo! (7^th ed.). Boston: Thomson-Heinle.

Interaction (2012): St. Onge, S., & St. Onge, R. (2012). Interaction: Langue et culture (8^th ed.). Boston: Thomson-Heinle.

Intrigue (2011): Blood, E., & Mobarek, Y. (2011). Intrigue: langue, culture et mystère dans le monde francophone (3^rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education/Prentice Hall.

Personnages (2010): Oates, M., & Dubois, J. (2010). Personnages: An Intermediate Course in French Language and Francophone Culture (4^th ed.). Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Quant à moi (2012): Bragger, J., & Rice, D. (2012). Quant à moi (5th ed.). Boston: Heinle and Heinle.

Séquences (2013): Bissière, M. (2013). Séquences: Intermediate French through Film (2^nd ed.). Boston: Cengage-Heinle.

Secondary Sources

 

6000+ Essential French Words. (2004). New York: Living Language.

Biber, D., Conrad, S. & Reppen, R. (1998). Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bolger, P., & Zapata, G. (2011). Semantic Categories and Context in L2 Vocabulary Learning. Language Learning 61(2), 614-646.

Byrnes, H. (1988). Whither Foreign Language Pedagogy: Reflections in Textbooks, Reflections on Textbooks. Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 21 (1), 29-36.

Cobb, T. (n.d.). Text Lex Compare v.3 [computer program]. (http://www.lextutor.ca/cgi-bin/tl_compare/;10-01-2017).

Cobb, T. (2014). Adopting corpus-based tools from English to other languages. Paper presented at the AILA World Congress, Brisbane, Australia.

Cobb, T., & Horst, M. (2004). Is there room for an Academic Word List in French? In P. Bogaards & B. Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a Second Language: Selection, acquisition, and testing (pp. 15-38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Davies, M. (2006). A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners. New York: Routledge.

Davies, M., & Face, T. L. (2006). Vocabulary Coverage in Spanish Textbooks: How Representative Is It? In N. Sagarra & A. J. Toribio (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Eldridge, J., & Neufeld, S. (2009). The graded reader is dead, long live the electronic reader. The Reading Matrix 9 (2), 224-244.

Erten, I. H., & Tekin, M. (2008). Effects on vocabulary acquisition of presenting new words in semantic sets versus semantically unrelated sets. System 36, 407-422.

Etienne, C., & Sax, K. (2009). Stylistic Variation in French: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Textbooks. Modern Language Journal 93 (4), 584-606.

Finkbeiner, M., & Nicol, J. (2003). Semantic category effects in second language word learning. Applied Psycholinguistics 24 (03), 369-383.

Folse, K. S. (2004). Vocabulary Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Fonseca-Greber, B., & Waugh, L. (2003). On the Radical Difference between the Subject Personal Pronouns in Written and Spoken European French. Language and Computers 46 (1), 225-240.

Godev, C. B. (2009). Word-Frequency and Vocabulary Acquisition: An Analysis of Elementary Spanish College Textbooks in the USA. Revista de linguística teórica y aplicada, 47 (2), 51-68.

Heilenman, L. K. (1993). Of cultures and compromises: Publishers, textbooks, and the academy. Publishing Research Quarterly 9 (2), 55-67.

Herschensohn, J. (1988). Linguistic Accuracy of Textbook Grammar. The Modern Language Journal, 72(4), 409-414.

Horst, M. (2013). Mainstreaming Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. The Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (1), 171-188.

Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Kurgebov, E. (2006). Must-Know French: Essential Words For A Successful Vocabulary. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lipinski, S. (2010). A Frequency Analysis of Vocabulary in Three First-Year Textbooks of German. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German 43 (2), 167-174.

Lonsdale, D., & Le Bras, Y. (2009). A Frequency Dictionary of French: Core Vocabulary for Learners. New York: Routledge.

Matsuoka, W., & Hirsh, D. (2010). Vocabulary learning through reading: does an ELT course book provide good opportunities? Reading in a Foreign Language 22 (1), 56-70.

McCoy, H. (2011). 2,001 Most Useful French Words. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

McCrostie, J. (2007). Investigating the Accuracy of Teachers' Word Frequency Intuitions. RELC Journal, 38 (1), 53-66.

Meara, P. (1995). The Importance of an Early Emphasis on L2 Vocabulary. The Language Teacher 19 (2), 8-10.

Nation, P. (2000). Learning Vocabulary in Lexical Sets: Dangers and Guidelines. TESOL Journal, 9 (2), 6-10.

Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nation, P., & Macalister, J. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. New York: Routledge.

Nation, P., & Meara, P. (2002). Vocabulary. In N. Schmitt (Ed.), An Introduction to Applied Linguistics (pp. 35-54). London: Arnold.

O'Connor Di Vito, N. (1991). Incorporating Native Speaker Norms in Second Language Materials. Applied Linguistics 12 (4), 383-396.

O'Connor Di Vito, N. (1992). "Present" Concerns about French Language Teaching. The Modern Language Journal 76 (1), 50-57.

O’Loughlin, R. (2012). Tuning In to Vocabulary Frequency in Coursebooks. RELC Journal, 43 (2), 255-269.

Richards, J. C. (1993). Beyond the Text Book: the Role of Commercial Materials in Language Teaching. RELC Journal 24 (1), 1-14.

Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schmitt, N. (2008). Instructed second language vocabulary learning. Language Teaching Research 12 (3), 329-363.

Siepmann, D., Bürgel, C., & Diwersy, S. (2017). The Corpus de référence du français contemporain (CRFC) as the First Genre-Diverse Mega-Corpus of French. International Journal of Lexicography 30 (1): 63-84.

Tinkham, T. (1993). The effects of semantic clustering on the learning of second language vocabulary. System 21 (3), 371-380.

Tomlinson, B. (Ed.) (2013). Applied Linguistics and Materials Development. London: Bloomsbury.

Walz, J. (1986). Is Oral Proficiency Possible with Today's French Textbooks? The Modern Language Journal 70 (1), 13-20.

Waring, R. (1997). The negative effects of learning words in semantic sets. System 25 (2), 261-274.

Author:

Dr. Jennifer Wagner

PhD in Applied Linguistics (University of South Australia)

Private address:

1301 East Lake Road

Clio MI 48420

USA

Email: jenniferlynnwagner.com

1 A larger corpus, the Corpus de référence du français contemporain, will be available in 2018 and it will include 310 million words of French from France, including both spoken and written sources from 1945 to 2014 (Siepmann et al. 2017).

2 Two years, or four semesters, of French language courses are generally required before students may enrol in upper level courses at American universities.