The purpose of this study was to compare and analyze a corpus of Anthony Browne’s picture books with other four corpora including elementary school English textbooks, children’s literature, fantasy movies for children, and CANCODE. In an effort to...
The purpose of this study was to compare and analyze a corpus of Anthony Browne’s picture books with other four corpora including elementary school English textbooks, children’s literature, fantasy movies for children, and CANCODE. In an effort to enhance the authenticity of English textbooks in terms of the selection and use of basic vocabulary, similarities and differences of vocabulary were evaluated and analyzed among the corpora. The following results were drawn: first, with reference to TTR analysis, the results show that Browne’s picture books are 14.07, which is the highest level among analyzed corpora due to the small size of the corpus and use of a variety of vocabulary derivatives. On the other hand, the TTR of elementary English textbooks is 10.90. Second, the vocabulary lists from the picture books, children’s literature, and CANCODE show a considerably high rate of accordance. Third, in connection with frequency of nouns, Browne’s picture books, children’s literature, and fantasy movies show a higher ratio of nouns ahead of lexical verbs. However, in the case of elementary English textbooks, they show the highest ratio of pronouns at 16.23%. Fourth, although the accordance rate of nouns among the corpora is very low, the frequency of two specific words, ‘time’ and ‘day’ is much higher. Fifth, the result of a comparison between the 391 vocabulary which appeared more than 8 times in Browne’s picture books and the required 800 vocabulary from the MOE recommended curriculum currently used matched by 55.2%, 216, despite the relatively small size of the corpus. Based on the above mentioned findings, the vocabulary utilized in elementary English textbooks needs to change to reflect the commonly used vocabulary in the corpora.