The corpus-based analysis of authenticity of elt course books used in high schools in Turkey

Foreign language teaching materials in countries where the target language is not spoken in daily life are the sole essential sources of input both inside and outside of the classroom. Of those materials, the course books used as reference and source materials, have, without doubt, been utilized frequently and they almost form the cornerstone of language teaching. In Turkey, the language teaching curriculum and course materials as well as other subjects are prepared by a commission of Turkish experts in the Ministry of National Education and are mandated for all kinds of schools throughout the country. Thus, all the language learning students in all high schools are exposed to ?roughly ? the same amount of teaching time and course books. Therefore, the content, impact, methodology and language competence of these course books are of vital importance for a successful language teaching. Considering the fact that the course books are nearly the only source for students to interact both in the classroom and out of the classroom, their importance is increasing more. Since a language is a living entity which continuously changes, the first step for successful language teaching is to revise, renew and analyze the course books more often. In the light of such information, in this study, the resemblance of the language learning course books used in Turkey to authentic language spoken by native speakers is explored by using a corpus-based approach. For this, the 10-million-word spoken part of the British National Corpus was selected as reference corpus. After that, all language learning course books used in high schools in Turkey were scanned and transferred to SketchEngine, an online corpus query tool. Lastly, certain grammar points were extracted first from British National Corpus and then from course books; similarities and differences were compared. At the end of the study, it was found that the language learning course books have little similarity to authentic language in terms of certain grammatical items and frequency of their collocations. In this way, the points to be revised and changed were explored. In addition, this study emphasized the role of corpus approach as a material development and analysis tool; and tested the functionality of course books for writers and for Ministry of National Education. Keywords: Language learning course books, Authenticity, Corpus, Corpus based analysis.