Research On Lexical Behavior In Oxford Textbooks For Junior High School Students

This paper takes co-selection theory as the framework,mainly including the co-selection of form and meaning,the co-selection of word and structure and the co-selection between words.Based on the co-selection research,Sinclair(1996)summarizes the model of extended units of meaning.The model is defined by note words,collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody.Among them,collocation and colligation respectively reflect the relationship of co-occurence between note words and collocation and between note word and colligation.Semantic preference is the co-occurrence relationship between the whole phrase unit and the word with certain semantic characteristics.This study aims to verify whether the teaching materials from Oxford English Textbooks for Junior High School Students in Jiangsu Province presents the elements of native speakers' most common co-selection.The thesis aims to address the following research questions:(1)What is the characteristic of collocation words in Oxford English Textbooks,compared with BNC?(2)What is the characteristic of colligation words in Oxford English Textbooks,compared with BNC?(3)What is the characteristic of semantic preference in Oxford English Textbooks,compared with BNC?This thesis selects BNC as the reference corpus and Jiangsu Oxford English for Junior High School Students first published by Yilin Publishing House in 2013 as the target corpus which is made up of six books and forty-four units,the target corpus is created by the writer herself for three months,and the data-based approach is mainly used to establish colligation according to concordance lines and examine and generalize the semantic features of collocates through referring to the colligation.with the help of AntConc 3.2.1w,the writer extracts four high frequent words,like like,use,big,show,to analyze the lexical behavior from the perspective of collocation,colligation and semantic preference,it is operated to analyze and study the random selection of the concordance lines,while using COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary as evidence,to verify whether these high frequent words present the elements of native speakers'most common co-selection,such as the co-selection of form and meaning,the co-selection of word and structure and the co-selection between words.The major findings of the study are as follows:1.The results suggest that the variety of high frequency collocations is inadequate and not representative enough.There are distinctive features in collocations between BNC and OET.Take like as an example,the common phrases like sounded like,looks like,tasted like are hardly seen in OET.2.The results suggest that the patterns of colligation are not rich enough.There are distinctive features in colligation between BNC and OET.Take show as a example,the common structure of S+V does not appear in OET.Instead,show as a noun is overused.3.The study shows that semantic preference is affected by editors' native language,the phenomenon of overusing collocations occur.Moreover,it refers to the editors' native language transfer.It is probably that learners acquire L2 language through teaching materials.Take big as an example,the meaning describes a big person or thing is large in physical size.It is used frequently.The data shows it appears 40 times in 55 samples.The study also briefly discusses the implications of improving teachers' ability of analyzing and perfecting teaching materials,verifying relevant linguistic hypotheses,and improving EFL teaching.