© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Texts and frequency lists: some implications for practising teachers
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Nilgün Hanciolu is an EAP teacher at the Department of General Education, Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU), Northern Cyprus. She has an MA in ELT from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara and is currently working on her PhD dissertation in ELT at EMU. Her current research interests include academic writing, corpus studies, data-driven learning, and lexical semantics
John Eldridge also teaches at EMU, at the Department of General Education. He has an MSC in ELT from Aston University and an MBA in Educational Management from Leicester University. His current interests include semantic frequency, teacher autonomy, and the discourse of management
Email: nilgun.hancioglu{at}emu.edu.tr
Email: john.eldridge{at}emu.edu.tr
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Abstract |
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Written texts play a major role in the work of English language teachers, and it is obviously important to consider how we select those texts, what difficulties students might encounter with them, and how those difficulties might be surmounted. But what is it that makes a text difficult? These days there are tools available to any teacher with access to Microsoft Word and the Internet, which can provide instant data about texts. These include software which provides detailed analysis of texts based on frequency lists. In this survey, five texts are analysed using these tools. The data is compared with comments provided by a sample of teachers and students concerning the same texts. The study concludes with some suggestions as to how teachers might go about text selection, and how approaches to teaching both reading and writing in the language classroom might be further informed by the insights that emerge.