Analysis of vocabulary of grade ten English textbook

Abstract

Vocabulary analysis is an important academic task. Analysis of the vocabulary items in a textbook will help enhance the teaching of vocabulary. Regarding this point in mind, the present research work was conducted. The purpose of the study was to find out the status of the vocabulary items used in the current English textbook for grade ten. The study further aimed at listing the vocabulary items used in the textbook together with their frequencies. The vocabulary items were analysed in terms of their parts of speech, phonological structure and morphological structure. For the purpose of analysing the vocabulary items used in the textbook, alphabet wise list of vocabulary items was made and their frequency was counted. From the list, the words were classified in terms of parts of speech and the phonological and morphological structure of the vocabulary items were analysed. The English textbook for grade-10 contains 24901 words altogether. In terms of total number, 2556 total different vocabulary items are used in the textbook. Among all the highest number of vocabulary items are nouns. Out 2556 vocabulary items, 1160 (45.38%) are nouns, 760 are verbs (742 lexical and 18 auxiliary), 401 are adjectives, 100 adverbs, 32 pronouns, 21 prepositions, 20 conjunctions, 3 articles, 27 interjections, 16 quantifiers and 16 numerals. Countable and singular noun have greater number than uncountable and plural ones. The verbs are found to be used in their past and past participle forms to a great extent. The adjectives are use in all degrees of comparison. The conjunction ‘and’ has the highest frequency of occurrence. Pronouns are found to be used much in the textbook. Among then, the personal pronoun ‘you’ has the highest frequency of occurrence. The largest number of vocabulary items in the textbook are one syllabic. The largest number of words have the syllable structure ‘CVC’. The number of monomorphemic words is more than that of the polymorphic ones. Complex words are found containing both single and multiple affixations. The number of words with single affixation is greater then the number of words with multiple affixation. The study consists of four chapters. Chapter one introduces the study in terms of general background, review of related literature, objectives of the study and significance of the study. Chapter two deals with the methodology applied to carry out the research work. It consists of sources of data, sample population and sampling procedure, tools for data collection, process of data collection and limitations of the study. Chapter three presents the analysis and interpretations of the data. The data collected have been analysed and interpreted in various ways in this chapter. Chapter four incorporates findings and recommendations. On the basis of analysis and interpretation, some significant findings and some recommendations for pedagogical implications are made. This chapter is followed by references and appendices. In the appendices section, the tools for data collection have been presented.