AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH VOCABULARY AND LEXICAL ACTIVITIES IN “GLOBAL SUCCESS” ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS (GRADE 3, 6, 10)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18173/2354-1075.2025-0073Keywords:
English vocabulary, textbooks, frequent vocabulary, academic words, corpus, academic word list, Vietnam, coursebooksAbstract
Vocabulary plays a crucial role in English textbooks, and evaluating its suitability is essential for effective teaching and learning. With various English textbook series currently in use in the Vietnamese educational context, assessing their effectiveness remains critical. However, there exists a scarcity of published studies that evaluate the recently introduced English coursebook series, “Global Success.” This research focuses on the vocabulary system and language activities in the Global Success 3, 6, and 10 textbooks used within the 2018 Vietnamese National Curriculum with the aim of identifying the vocabulary levels required for each grade, based on the British National Corpus (BNC)/Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) list of high-frequency words, the Academic Word List (AWL), and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Additionally, the study examines the diversity of language activity types in the textbooks based on Jack C. Richards' (2006) classification “Communicative language teaching today”. The research employs a quantitative and corpus-based approach to analyze the vocabulary and language activities in the textbooks. The findings show that Global Success 3 had the most vocabulary included in 1000 frequency words, the academic vocabulary in the three course books of the Global Success series was remarkably low, and there is an abundance of advanced lexical resources. Moreover, a lack of communicative activities in the book “Global Success 10” has been detected in this study. Based on these findings, the researcher proposes several recommendations for improving the quality of the textbooks, ultimately improving vocabulary teaching and learning in Vietnam, including simplifying the text for low-level students, including more academic words in teaching vocabulary using the Academic Word List (AWL), and enhancing communicative practice activities.
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