LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF GENERAL ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS IN IRANIAN UNIVERSITIES

Currently, immediate and academic needs of the learners have gained much importance in the evaluation of learning materials. In so doing, this study aimed at comparing a number of General English (GE) reading textbooks used in universities in Iran in terms of their vocabulary size, vocabulary levels and text coverage. Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) containing 570 word families, the BNC 14,000 high-frequency English word lists, and the 2000 English words required by Iran’s Ministry of Education were chosen as the base word lists. The results showed that a General English textbook can contribute to learning 47–407 interdisciplinary academic words. Beyond the 2,000-word level, a GE textbook can supply students with 158–2001 new word families. Syllabus designers and materials producers can take advantage of the findings of the study through needs analysis for the specification and sequencing of the lexical items in general English textbooks.