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Chapter 4 Results and Discussions

4.1 The Results
This section will show the results of the two tests. From Table 4.1 to Table 4.5 isthe base word coverage in the five textbooks and from Table 4.6 to Table 4.10 is thefrequency of the sampled words. Table 4.1 presents the coverage of the three base word lists in Book 1. Asmentioned earlier, token is similar to “word” in meaning and here in Book 1, 11535tokens in base word one is covered, accounting 81.83 percent of all the tokens. That isto say, Book 1 covered the majority of the most frequent 1000 words in daily English.The words covered in base word one, two and three make up 91.9 percent of all thetokens in total. We can say that Book 1 covers the most frequent and the secondfrequent 3000 words in daily life, including the frequent words appeared in uppersecondary school and university text from a wide range of subjects.On the other hand, what is more important is the type of the words in Book 1because it represents the variety and the breadth of the words in Book 1. Word typecoverage is not so good as the tokens. Here Book 1 covers 1003 word types in baseword one, which makes up 55.11 percent of the whole book. All the word typescovered in the three base word lists up to 1412, altogether 77.58 percent of all theword types in Book 1. At the same time, we should also notice that 408 types ofwords appeared in the “not in the list” column, that is to say, 22.42 percent of theword type in Book 1 belong to the not frequently used word types, which means thereis still room for the book to make its word type better. Although the number of theword types in the “not in the lists” column can have a gradual increase as the students’competence accumulate, it should not be in Book 1 where students just start theirsenior English study.

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Conclusion

Based on the important role that textbooks and vocabulary play in Englishlearning, this study was conducted to investigate the coverage of the base words inPaul Nation in the five compulsory New Standard English textbooks and thefrequency of the words. After the study, the research findings can be summarized:To begin with, the coverage investigation suggests that the five compulsory NewStandard English textbooks basically cover the base word lists in Paul Nation. Thethree base word lists provided in Paul Nation, around 4000 words, including most ofthe practical and frequent words in daily life. The coverage of the three base words inthe five compulsory New Standard textbooks reach 79.08 percent, 7.16 percent and2.61 percent. The tokens in the coverage of the first three word lists are up to 89.57percent. We can say that the coverage of the five textbooks of the base words isgenerally good, which has significant meaning for the students to master morepractical and useful words in daily life. This is just what a textbook compiler shoulddo because the purpose of English learning is to use it skillfully.
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