Vocabulary Coverage in Spanish Textbooks: How Representative is It?

Certainly one of the primary goals in developing materials for second language learners should be to create materials that reflect vocabulary and grammar that these learners are likely to encounter in the “real world”. There is little to be gained from having students memorize long lists of vocabulary in a textbook, if the learners never again encounter these words once they venture out in the “real world”. The goal of this paper is to determine how well Spanish textbooks do in terms of including realistic, frequency-based vocabulary. We will consider this from two different points of view. First, in quantitative terms, we will consider what percentage of the vocabulary in textbooks appears in standard frequency listings of Spanish vocabulary (and vice versa). Second, in qualitative terms, we will consider what type of vocabulary is both over-represented and also under-represented in Spanish textbooks, vis a vis actual frequency data from other sources. Before we can address either question, however, we first need to consider two additional questions. First, where can we go to get reliable frequency data for Spanish? Second, how do we measure the vocabulary that appears in textbooks. We will consider the fist two questions in Sections 2 and 3. In Sections 4 and 5 we will then return to the question of representativeness of vocabulary in Spanish textbooks – from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view. Finally, in a point that we will come back to later in the paper, we should note that this is not a paper on second language acquisition in general, nor the specific issue of vocabulary acquisition. Our focus is strictly the quantitative, corpus-based issue of how vocabulary in Spanish textbooks relates to “real world” language use. Thus this study is only one part of the puzzle, although arguably one of the first pieces needed to create the entire picture.