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Evaluating Arabic textbooks: A corpus‐based lexical frequency study
Author(s) -
Moser Janelle
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/ijal.12321
Subject(s) - arabic , linguistics , vocabulary , salient , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , psychology , philosophy
Abstract Textbooks play an essential role in foreign language programs; however, it is unclear if their contents match the most salient linguistic forms championed by usage‐based approaches to second language acquisition (SLA). Through the lens of a corpus‐based approach via lexical frequency, this study evaluates five of the most popular Arabic textbooks. Vocabulary was vowelled and lemmatized using the MADAMIRA morphological analyzer and compared to the first 3,000 most frequent words from A frequency dictionary of Arabic using AntWordProfiler. Results show a relatively low number of items at each frequency band, and subsequent recommendations are made for filling lexical gaps in Arabic and L2 textbooks.