A Comparative Study on Vocabulary between New Horizon and New Standard College English from Internal Evaluation

1、a comparative study on vocabulary between new horizon and new standard college english from internal evaluation abstract: this essay evaluates the vocabulary difference in new horizon college english and new standard college english through setting up two databases of the words, to compare the volum

2、e, the proportion, the frequency, and the learning method of the new words of each book, involving quantitative approach, in order to provide some enlightenment for those researchers who are interested in this field. keywords: textbook evaluation; vocabularyproject: comparative textbook evaluation b

3、etween nsce and nhcefund: the china fifth educational fund新視野與新標準大學英語詞匯內(nèi)部對比研究 摘 要:本文主要通過建立新標準大學英語與新視野大學英語詞庫，從詞匯本身內(nèi)部角度，定量研究兩套教材內(nèi)部新詞總量、所占比率浮現(xiàn)率及學習詞匯方法各個方面的不同，目的是為同樣對此方面感興趣的同行提供參考。關鍵字: 教材評估；詞匯 new horizon college english (nhce) and the new standard college english (nsce) are two sets of currently-used t

4、extbooks for non-english majors by foreign language teaching and research press. the reason for vocabulary to be taken as a single aspect of textbook evaluation is two-fold. first，it is because vocabu1ary acquisition has its unchallengeable place in textbooks，so vocabulary 1argely decides the qualit

5、y of a textbook. secondly，it is because the criteria of vocabulary can be easily quantified in the evaluation process.the internal evaluation about the new words focuses on the internal accountability of the words themselves, including the new word volume, the new word proportion, the word frequency

6、, and the word learning method in each exercise. furthermore, the rapid development of databases offers a handy tool as well as an examination platform for evaluation. cunningsworth (1984) argues that in normal circumstances the proportion of new words in a text should not exceed 5% of the total in

7、that it does little good to students in forming good communication strategies to work out the meanings of unfamiliar words by using context. after analyzing the data bases with the help of word smart 2010 and the data bases of two sets of book1, the results about the size and proportion of new vocab

8、ulary are listed below (see table 1)：table 1 related statistics of new vocabularies in two booksitemnhcenscetotal size of new vocabulary734 words715 wordslength of the texts13914 words14434 wordsaverage proportion of new vocabulary734/13914=5.27%715/14434=4.95%so in this aspect, the average proporti

9、on of new vocabulary 5.27 % of nhce is not very proper. on the other hand, the proportion of nsce 4.95% is just under 5% and very proper. then the statistics of groups of five words are picked out by 500 words. for the top five words of each book, they are even same words like “the”, “to”, “and”, “a

10、”, and “of” with a small difference in number. and then from number 501 to 505 words, they are also commonly-used words and appear six times too. next, the following words are all commonly used and appearing fewer and fewer times. last, for number 2001 to 2005 words, basically they are new words and

11、 appear only once until the last word of each book. since the total number of words in nhce is larger than that in nsce, so the ratio of frequency of words in nearly zero while that of nsce is 0.01. as we can see, there is not so much difference in the word frequency of these two books.for the appro

12、aches applied in the book to help students learn the vocabularies, lets make an introduction of the exercises of vocabularies in both of the books. on one hand, in section a of nhce, the exercise a contains blank filling and banked cloze. and in section b, there are blank filling and word choosing.

13、on the other hand, there are three parts of exercises related with the word-learning, named dealing with unfamiliar words including definition-matching, synonym replacement, situational choices, and word collocation explanation and application in nsce. from the above discussion, there are enough new

14、 vocabularies in both of the books to meet requirement of the cecr. and for the repetition rate of new words, there is not so much difference. however, the average new word proportion of nhce is not very proper, while the proportion of nsce is very proper. last, no matter from the volume and the div

15、ersity, nsce provide a better word-learning method than those of nhce.therefore, it is important that new vocabularies of the book should be controlled in terms of quantity and difficulty. when we choose textbook, it is better to choose texts where new words are spread over instead of being together

16、 so that the density of new words is within the ability and interest of the students, because the size of new vocabulary is quite important to ensure reasonable learning load and also to ensure that there are sufficient familiar words in the text to provide a comprehensible context.參考文獻:1cunnings worth, a. evaluating and selecting efl tea