الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Corpus and pedagogic research has provided reliable evidence on the significance of integrating multiword units (MWUs) in EFL courses. Accordingly, the present study aims to examine how MWUs are presented in Egyptian secondary school EFL textbooks. Eight categories of MWUs, namely, fixed expressions, semi-fixed expressions, non-decomposable idioms, decomposable idioms, binomials, compound nominals, colligations and lexical collocations, were examined in four secondary school EFL textbooks taught at public schools in Egypt. One of the four textbooks represented general education EFL textbooks while the other three represented the different types of technical education EFL textbooks, i.e. agricultural, commercial and industrial EFL textbooks. Corpus analysis of all the explicitly presented MWUs as well as a sample of the implicitly presented ones in the sample textbooks was conducted to investigate the frequency of occurrence of each item in a large native speaker corpus, namely, the British National Corpus (BNC), as well as its range of occurrences in the five main sub-corpora of the BNC. Consequently, a Pedagogic Value (PV) score consisting of the average frequency score and the average range score was assigned to each item. The findings of the present study indicate that the authors of the EFL textbooks did not pay due attention to all categories of MWUs in their design of the textbooks. In addition, the low PV scores of explicitly presented MWUs compared to the PV scores of the sample of implicitly presented ones signify the lack of clear objective criteria on which the authors of these textbooks can base their selections of MWUs to be explicitly presented. Furthermore, MWUs presented in technical education EFL textbooks were found to be similar to those items presented in the general education EFL textbook. This contradicts the recommendations of English for. |