Is the Echo English series relevant for advanced learners? : -A study on lexical character and recycling in two Swedish EFL textbooks for upper secondary school

Sammanfattning: This study aims to provide additional research into how Swedish EFL textbooks support incidental vocabulary learning through reading texts, specifically for textbooks aimed at upper secondary school, expecting a greater emphasis on recycling mid- and low-frequency words. The study has investigated the lexical character of two textbooks, Echo English 5 and Echo English 7, as well as how they recycle lemmas and how well they recycle lemmas from the mid- and low-frequency bands. Incidental vocabulary learning is the process in which words are learned as a secondary objective when the focus of the learning task lies elsewhere. An important component of incidental learning is the frequency at which unknown words are encountered, with 10 encounters being a good benchmark for learning. As these textbooks are aimed at upper secondary school, it can be expected that most of the areas where learning can still be achieved lie within the mid- and low-frequency bands, that being everything below the 3000 most common word families. The study is corpus-inspired, and an online vocabulary profiler was used to compare the texts present in the textbooks to the BNC-COCA corpus to examine the lexical profile of the texts at large. The same was then done with a lemma tagged version of each text, and the level of recycling, as well as its character, was analysed. Similar to what previous research in this field has shown, no evidence has been found that the textbooks properly support incidental learning in the relevant frequency bands, even though the texts included are of an appropriate lexical difficulty level for students of upper secondary school.