Investigating Multiword Units in EFL Textbooks

Over the past decade, the importance of multiword units has received an increasing amount of attention, and is now almost a must-have component in the practice of English language teaching. The current study examined multiword units promoted by textbook publishers from a more cautious perspective. A profile of multiword units was established, based on three series of EFL textbooks including Top Notch English Course, Touchstone and Passages. The reason behind choosing these textbooks was that they were written for EFL learners at beginning to advanced proficiency levels, so all the range of proficiency levels were included in these books. They are designed for integrated language skills. These books together represent a great sample of the latest published mainstream ELT textbooks. The frequency of the major types of multiword units: idioms, collocations, compounds, phrasal verbs, fixed and semi fixed expressions and binomials was counted in these textbooks and the results were analyzed by using chi-square to show that the difference between types of MWUs is significant. The results indicated collocations and compounds were the most frequent MWUs and except Top-Notch, other textbooks had an accessional process in the use of MWUs in each of their books in each level. These results of the study have implications for language learners and language instructors and materials developers.

کلیدواژه ها:

Multiword units ، EFL textbooks ، proficiency levels