A survey of words in Swedish Secondary School Textbooks and Multilingual students’ understanding.

When investigating questions like “What characterizes the vocabulary of school book texts in general and in different subjects at different levels?” and “Which words present particular problems for students studying in their second language?” school book corpora offer important empirical data. We have therefore compiled and analyzed a corpus of secondary school textbooks of one million words (OrdiL) with texts from eight different school subjects contributed by three different publishers (Lindberg & Johansson Kokkinakis 2007). In order to perform comparative studies and analyses on the vocabulary of these texts we have performed computer-based disambiguation and semantic analyses at a lemma- and lexeme-level. Moreover, we have carried out word frequency analyses, including comparative analyses of relative frequency and dispersion between different subjects. To be able to distinguish characteristic features of school book vocabulary we use an equally sized reference corpus of easy-to-read texts as a point of comparison. The vocabulary of this corpus is representative of the kind of written language that children at this age can be exposed to out of school.