Swedish Upper Secondary School English

A study examined the English vocabulary of English textbooks used in Swedish upper secondary schools to distinguish differences between the vocabulary of the textbooks and modern, everyday English as represented by newspapers, books and the colloquial language. Fifty-six books were included in the sample. In the selection process, account was made not only of the popularity of each book, but also of its distribution among different types of school and different grades to determine the rising level of difficulty in vocabulary between grades. These texts, referred to as the GYM corpus, were then compared to the COBUILD Corpus which represents the largest computerized English collection of texts available. Results revealed a different vocabulary profile in GYM texts from that found in normal English prose as represented by COBUILD texts. Proportions between abstract and concrete, between complicated and simple, were found to be shifted in GYM texts in favor of the concrete and simple. To some extent this is understandable, since the COBUILD texts are mainly addressed to adult, native speakers of English. Additionally, GYM texts appeared insufficiently progressive, with the result that the difficult words were very often randomly distributed among the grades, instead of growing successively more common. (One figure and four tables of data are included.) (KEH)