CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF AUTHENTICITY OF ELT COURSE BOOKS USED IN HIGH SCHOOLS IN TURKEY

Turkey, LLCE2016-292;         In Turkey, the language teaching curriculum and course materials are prepared by a commission of Turkish experts in the Ministry of National Education. All the language learning students in all high schools are exposed to same course books. In this study, the resemblance of the language learning course books used in Turkey to authentic language spoken by native speakers is explored by using a corpus-based approach. For this, the 10-million-word spoken part of the British National Corpus was selected as reference corpus. Then, all language learning course books used in Turkey were scanned and transferred to SketchEngine query tool. Lastly, certain grammar points were extracted first from British National Corpus and then from course book corpus; similarities and differences were compared. At the end, it was found that the language learning course books have little similarity to authentic language in terms of certain grammatical items and frequency of their collocations. This way, the points to be revised and changed were explored. In addition, this study emphasized the role of corpus approach as a material development and analysis tool; and tested the reliability and validity of course books.

Keywords: Language learning course books, Authenticity, Corpus, Corpus based analysis