A comparison of vocabulary items in eighth grade English coursebooks

In Turkey, where most of the students have limited exposure time to target language, coursebooks are important resources. Therefore, vocabularies in coursebooks should be the most frequent words used by native speakers. For this reason, the purpose of this thesis is to analyze appropriateness of vocabularies in coursebooks to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) A2 level, the use of high frequent vocabularies in accordance with British National Corpus (BNC), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Academic Word List (AWL). In addition to these, the most frequent 50 verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the coursebooks were found. Upswing English and Mastermind which were handed out by Ministry of National Education (MoNE) to the students were selected to analyze. In addition to these coursebooks, More&More, Marathon Plus and Touchstone 2 were included in this thesis. Touchstone 2 was selected to analyze because it was a corpus-based book. To analyze vocabulary, online corpus tools called AntConc and Textinspector were used. The results show that the most frequent verbs in the course books are do, is, are, have, the most frequent adjectives are correct, short, natural, great, good, new, social, first, favorite and the most frequent adverbs are then, really, there, here, very, always, too, well, more, usually and often. The results also show that Touchstone 2 mostly correspond to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) A2 level, British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) first 2000 lists. When the coursebooks are compared to Academic Word List (AWL), Upswing English has the highest percentage (%6.88). In conclusion, although Touchstone 2 has the highest percentage, the writers of all the coursebooks should revise their vocabulary selection.