Vocabulary input in EFL textbooks

Abstract

This paper reports the results obtained after analysing the vocabulary input contained in a corpus of EFL textbooks from the last year of Spanish Primary and Secondary Education. We consider the fifty most frequent words in each textbook under study as a sample of analysis and deal with their word type, word frequency, frequency rank, and the percentage they represent in the whole textbook. A comparison between the textbooks belonging to the same and different educational level is carried out, and we also attempt to assess the influence of the increase in the number of types and tokens between the end of each educational stage and regard the implications of their repetition in EFL textbooks for the acquisition of vocabulary.