Differences between ELT textbooks and English language corpora: A quick look into the Chilean context

Abstract

This paper aims to compare the differences between formulas1 taken from dialogues of two international EFL textbooks used in the Chilean context with the frequency of occurrence provided by the English language corpora. The statistical analysis of formulas used to make offers such as would you like some…? And do you want some…? And formulas used to make requests such as Would you mind if…? And would it be O.K if…? revealed some important discrepancies between these formulas presented in teacher-made textbooks and their frequency of occurrence in the corpora. This latter shows the lack of authenticity of such teaching materials.

Full text

The Language, Education and Culture Journal Differences between ELT textbooks and English language corpora
1
Differences between ELT textbooks and English language corpora: A
quick look into the Chilean context.
William A. Godoy de la Rosa
University of Nottingham
Abstract
This paper aims to compare the differences between formulas
1
taken from dialogues of two
international EFL textbooks used in the Chilean context with the frequency of occurrence
provided by the English language corpora. The statistical analysis of formulas used to make
offers such as would you like some…? And do you want some…? And formulas used to make
requests such as Would you mind if…? And would it be O.K if…? revealed some important
discrepancies between these formulas presented in teacher-made textbooks and their frequency
of occurrence in the corpora. This latter shows the lack of authenticity of such teaching
materials.
Keywords: textbooks, authenticity, formulas, frequency, language corpora, Chilean context
Resumen
Este artículo tiene como objetivo comparar las fórmulas de cortesía extraídas de dos textos
internacionales utilizados en Chile para la enseñanza del inglés con sus respectivas frecuencias
proporcionadas por corpus lingüísticos del inglés. Para esto, se realizó un análisis de las
fórmulas de ofrecimiento: Would you like some…? y Do you want some…? y las fórmulas de
petición : Would you mind if…? y Would it be O.K if…?. Los corpus lingüísticos indicaron
diferencias significativas entre las fórmulas analizadas y la frecuencia de ocurrencia de éstas,
demostrando así la poca autenticidad del idioma inglés en los textos de estudios.
Palabras claves: texto de estudio, autenticidad, fórmulas de cortesía, frecuencia, lingüística de
corpus, contexto chileno.
1 Introduction
It is well known that English is considered the language of international communication. It
is the language used between native speakers of a different mother tongue other than English,
and between native speakers of English and non-native speakers (Mckay, 2002). This
widespread notion has emphasised the interest of many non-native language users who had
learnt, are learning and will learn English as a foreign language. According to Crystal (2003)
this interest has generated a growing number of users which is now difficult to determine. In
addition, he also states that English is regard as the language for economic, cultural and
technological power. Therefore, the importance of English in certain areas of the world such as
East Asia, Eastern Europe and South America is due to the fact that English monolingual
companies are being expanded to these areas where English has had low presence.
In Chile, changes in the educational system have been made in order to satisfy the labour
market demands. In 1998, the Ministry of Education presented a curriculum reform which
1
Schmitt (2000) defines formulas as the string of words that are commonly used to achieve some
purpose, e.g., requests: Would you please...?

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established English as a required subject in primary and secondary public schools replacing
French and German as optional foreign languages. Then, the Chilean curriculum has put
emphasis on receptive skills (listening and reading) as opposed to productive skills (speaking
and writing) so that learners are able to use English in order to process technical written texts,
academic lectures and presentations (McKay, 2003).
Moreover, the Ministry of Education provides public schools with local developed
textbooks. These textbooks include adapted language, local cultural content and geographical
information about Chile so that English can be learnt and used as international language
(McKay, 2003). But, the situation in private schools, universities, language schools and
international language institutes is different. They opt for international textbooks because
language should be less adapted and language learners may be exposed to a more natural and
authentic language. However, it has been argued that language authenticity is not always found
in textbooks (Carter, 1998; Tomlinson, 2008), but it is found in language corpora (Gries, 2009).
A language corpus allows the analysis and study of language patterns (Gries, 2009) such as
the formulas examined in this paper. They were taken from two international EFL textbooks
used in the Chilean context: New Headway Elementary (Soars, 2006) and New Interchange
Intermediate (Richards, 2005) and they were compared to three language corpora as the main
source of authentic data: the BYU-BNC: British National Corpus (100 million words), the Corpus of
Contemporary American English (COCA) (400+ million words) ( Davies, 2004;2008) and the book based
on the CANCODE corpus Exploring Spoken English (Carter and McCarthy, 1997).
This paper also includes a brief literature review which covers: a current research on
textbooks used in the Southern Cone, the native speaker model in textbooks, the situation of the
English as International Language (EIL) and the usefulness of technology and corpora in
language teaching. The data and the comparative analysis of the formulas are present in the
methodology. The discussion and conclusion are at the end of the paper.
2 The Need for Authentic Materials
Tomlinson (2008) made a comprehensive analysis of locally adapted and international
coursebooks used in the Southern Cone. He looked at countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile
and Uruguay finding the scanty use of authentic material. He also emphasises that they contain
“teacher-made texts” especially written for the coursebook as well as simple vocabulary and
structures.
An example of “teacher-made text” is the short dialogue taken from one of the international
textbook analysed. Here, it is possible to see how unnatural repetitions and complete answers
are given when this is unlikely to happen in real life conversation (Tomlinson, 2008).
Tom: What do you usually do in the morning Claire?
Claire: Well, I get up at 7:00 and I have breakfast.
Tom: Do you catch the train to work?
Claire: No, I don’t. I always walk to work.
The language employed in the previous dialogue is contrived and artificial, and therefore,
unnatural. This may be due to the fact that material writers design dialogues to reinforce or
present grammar points, new vocabulary or functional language (Gilmore, 2004). Moreover,
dialogues in some coursebooks are based on written examples and on a prescriptive approach to
'correct' English (McCarthy, 1995). This latter, however, could make a foreign speaker with
'perfect' English be considered inappropriate for native English speakers (Brown, G. & G. Yule.,
1983).
Another aspect of international EFL textbooks is the promotion of the native English
speaker as a role model. This is due to the fact that most of the textbooks focus either on
American or British English and textbook writers belong to an English speaking country
(Alptekin, 1993; O’Keeffe, 2007). But, copying the native speaker model means to embrace the

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native speaker´s culture as well (Carter, 1998) which may help learners participate successfully
in the target culture (Alptekin, 2002).
However, the idea of a native speaker as a model of teaching may be inappropriate. Mckay
(2002) points out that it is difficult to determine the native speaker as a model of competence
because of the wide varieties of English. She also argues that English should be taught as an
international language because of the growing number of non-native users who have been
influenced by the cultural hegemony of English, and, as a result, there is a globalised world and
English as its primary means of communication (Sweeny, 2006).
English language learners access to this global communication using the existing
technology. At the present time, more and more learners own portable devices such as mobiles
phones or smartphones (among others) with access to Internet. The WWW has enabled them to
have closer contact with naturally–occurring language in real time using the video sharing web
site YouTube, or other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Whatsapp. This type of
exposure to real and natural English used by native and non–native speaker, may give them the
opportunity to acquire language and to develop strategies for understanding language in
different social context (Widdowson, 1998).
Nonetheless, not only these sources describe authentic language, but also a corpus does.
Sinclair (1991) argues that corpus based research has improved the description of the language
which provides a basis for an improved pedagogy. An example of this is The International
Corpus of Learner English, ICLE (Granger, et.al., 2009) which is an error-coded corpus which
contains over two million words used by learners of English from different mother tongues and
backgrounds. This provides valuable research instances regarding typical error patterns and consequently,
teaching material can be better designed (O’Keeffe, 2007).
Corpora have also improved language teaching pedagogy and this is reflected in some
language materials such as dictionaries and textbooks recently developed. However, there are
some other textbooks which still focus on features of the language because of their degree of
teachability (Biber, et.al., 1994). McCarthy and Carter (1995) observed that there are eleven
frequent instances of reported speech with say and tell with past continuous in spoken discourse
that are not included in textbooks. This leads to think about the statement elicited by McEnery
and Wilson in 2001 that there are considerable differences between what textbooks are teaching
and how native speakers actually use language as evidenced in the corpora.
3 Methodology
3.1 Data
To find out about McEnery and Wilson’s statement, the analysis was centred on international
EFL textbooks used in the Chilean context. The textbooks analysed were the New Headway
Elementary (Soars, 2006) and the New Interchange Intermediate (Richards, 2005). The book
based on the CANCODE corpus by Carter and McCarthy Exploring Spoken English (1997) was
taken as evidence in the corpora as well as the BYU-BNC: British National (100 million words)
and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (400+ million words)
3.2 Analysis
In order to analyse what textbooks are teaching, the focus was on the frequency of occurrence of
the formulas in the BYU-BNC and COCA corpus. Frequency is an important aspect to analyse
because it indicates which words or language patterns appear “in circulation” in everyday use
among most of the native speakers (O’Keeffe, 2007). Another aspect of analysis is the spoken
features which may be shown in dialogues from textbooks. The formula to make an offer would
you like some...? is taught at elementary level in situations related to food. The example is taken
from the New Headway Elementary (Soars, 2006) Unit 9 Food you like, page 67. M is Daisy’s
mum and P is Piers.

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M: Hello, Piers. Would you like some tea or coffee?
P: I’d like a cold drink, if that´s OK.
M: Of course. Would you like some orange juice?
P: Yes, please. I‘d love some.
M: And would you like a chocolate biscuit?
P: Oh, yes, please! Thank you very much.
M: You´re welcome.
(New Headway Elementary, 2006)
In Carter and McCarthy’s book (1997) there is a similar situation in Unit 7 Cooking rice,
page 64. The extract presents <S2> a mother and <S3> her son.
14 <S2> D’you want a biscuit?
15 <S3> Erm
16 <S2> Biscuit?
17 <S3> Er yeah
(Exploring Spoken English, 1997)
In both extracts there is a visible difference in the use of formulas between dialogues. The
BYU-BNC computes for would you like some...? a frequency of 26 tokens per 2.61 million, and
COCA 22 tokens per 0.27 million words. Instead, BYU-BNC shows for do you want some...?
149 tokens per 14.95 million and COCA 17 tokens per 0.21 million words respectively.
Would you like some...? seems to be a formal manner to make an offer and it may be
included in textbooks as a useful functional language to teach and learn. The great frequency of
occurrence of do you want some..? suggests that textbook designers should pay more attention
to this frequency and integrate it into dialogues with more real and authentic language. The
language learner, therefore, will have more chances to be exposed to real everyday language so
as to see the differences between real English and dialogues in textbooks (Carter, 1998)
Another aspect to examine is the spoken features found in the dialogues. They are of great
importance because they show how native speakers monitor, manage, modify and soften their
messages towards the listener in a natural occurring conversation (O’Keeffe, 2007). In the
former dialogue, there is a lack of spoken features such as back-channels
2
which are present as
a response in the second sample. This problem of absence is also supported by Carter (1998)
who found out that other spoken features such as discourse markers, vague language, ellipsis
and hedges were missing after comparing dialogues from textbooks with real data taken from
the CANCODE.
2
McCarthy (1998) defines them as noises (which are not full words) and short verbal responses made by
the listener. Typical back-channels in English are: mm, uhum, yeah, no, right, oh, etc.

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It is important then that these spoken features should be included in textbooks in order to make
the English language learners recognise and distinguish when to engage in a conversation
effectively. Otherwise, he/she may be stereotyped or misjudged by the native speaker.
McCarthy (1998) points out the relevance of being aware of these spoken features by
exemplifying that a Spanish speaker produces irritation and impatience in a British speaker
when he acknowledges an incoming talk with what he translates to English as “Yes, yes, yes”!
The next example is taken from the New Interchange Intermediate (Richards, 2005) Unit 3,
page 16. The unit entitled Could you do me a favour? uses the formulas to make requests Would
you mind if..? and Would it be OK if...? in the dialogue between Jana and Rod.
Rod: Hello.
Jana: Hi, Rod. This is Jana.
Rod: Oh, hi, Jana. What´s up?
Jana: I’m going to my best friend’s wedding this weekend. I’d
love to take some pictures for his Web site. Would you
mind if I borrowed your new digital camera?
Rod: Um, no. That´s OK, I guess. I don´t think I´ll need it for anything.
Jana: Thanks a million.
Rod: Sure. Uh, have you used a digital camera before? It´s sort of complicated.
Jana: Uh-huh, sure, a couple of times. Would it be OK if I
picked it up on Friday night?
Rod: Yeah, I guess so.
(New Interchange Intermediate, 2005)
Although there is a presence of back-channels such as Yeah and I guess so, the requesting
formulas followed by the verb in past simple do not occur with much frequency. Would you
mind if...? presents a frequency of 4 tokens per 0.4 million in the BYU-BNC and COCA 12
tokens per 0.15 million words. Would it be OK if...? on the other hand, does not appear in the in
the BYU-BNC and in COCA shows 12 tokens per 0.15 million words.
However, the formula to make a request would you mind...? followed by a gerund or
infinitive appears with more frequency. The BYU-BNC presented a frequency of 25 tokens per
2.51 million words and COCA 85 tokens per 0.14 million words.

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4 Discussion and conclusion
Corpora give helpful information with regard to the authentic language employed by native
speakers. The frequency of occurrence of the language patterns analysed in the corpus illustrates
the differences between what the textbooks are teaching and how language is actually used by
native speakers. With the absence of this authentic data provided by the corpora, the probability
for a non-native to sound concocted and stilted is evident and he/ she may be wrongly perceived
by the native speaker leading to a non-effective communication.
Granger (1998) suggests that "… textbooks are more useful when they are based on
authentic native English". In other words, textbooks including authentic language may help
learners not only develop fluency (Beaugrande, 2001) but also achieve a degree of naturalness
in the use of foreign language (Fox, 1987).The Touchstone (McCarthy, et.al, 2005, 2006) series
is an example of how information from corpora such as patterns of great frequency and
discourse markers can be included in coursebook dialogues (O’Keeffe, 2007).
O’Keeffe (2007) also adds that for most pedagogic purposes in most contexts, it is
preferable to have naturally-occurring corpus based examples. The EFL instructor, therefore,
should enable the learners to notice real and natural language which can be compared with
language used in textbooks. This comparison may contribute to the learner´s inner motivation
because he/she may experience less frustration when trying to comprehend language from
sources where real and naturally occurring language can be found.
However, since English is considered the language of international communication, it may
appear inappropriate that textbooks include authentic native English. Carter (1998) states that
there is a massive amount of roughly 80 percent of non-native speakers who interact in English,
and Cook (2008), additionally, claims that the native speaker as a model to imitate may frustrate
the learners who realise that they “will never be the same as native speaker”. He also argues that
monolingual activities in coursebooks prevent the “richness of multilingual use”.
There is no doubt that textbooks are indispensable in the process of teaching and learning a
language in a foreign context. International and local developed textbooks should recognise the
importance of English as International Language (EIL) and they should include not only the
variety of cultures around the world (Cotazzi & Jin, 1999), but also authentic language taken
from an EFL/EIL corpus as well as situations and “examples of successful L2 users on which
students can model themselves” (Cook, 2008) so that the EFL/EIL language learner become
culturally and linguistically competent.

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