Investigating the listening corpus in English language textbooks for senior secondary school in China: A multidimensional analysis

An English textbook is an essential guide for English language learners. In order to better understand the structure of textbooks, researchers have applied several approaches to analyze them. The corpus-based approach has gained momentum due to the benefits of enabling empirical studies on language use and the development of various computational tools that make the analysis more efficient. Traditionally, researchers intend to evaluate a whole textbook, or to concentrate on one aspect of the textbook, such as vocabulary, phraseology, or syntactic contents. However, the listening components of Chinese senior secondary school English textbooks have never been subjected to any systematic analysis. To this end, this study aimed to investigate the senior secondary textbook listening parts, applying additive Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) (Biber, 1988/1995) to analyze the linguistic features and functions of the listening corpus from 46 senior high school textbooks.

The data used in the present study consist of 431 texts from six Chinese state-authorized publishers of the textbooks’ listening sections. The Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) (Nini, 2019), which replicates Biber’s (1988/1995) MDA, was used to conduct the analysis on the texts. The texts were first tagged by using MAT and then mapped onto Biber’s (1988/1995) six dimensions. The registers and text types were also used as independent variables in MANOVA to explore their impact on dimension scores. The additive MDA revealed that textbook conversations although involved, non-narrative, and overt expression of persuasion, are not close to natural conversations of the linguistic features on Dimension 1 (Involved versus Informational production), Dimension 2 (Narrative versus Non-narrative concerns), and Dimension 4 (Overt expression of persuasion). Textbook public speaking is involved, non-narrative, and explicit; textbook short passage is informational, non-narrative, explicit, and abstract. The results showed that registers or text types can impact on dimension scores, while the interaction between registers and text types had no impact on dimension scores.

Implications of the current study can be considered from methodological and pedagogical perspectives. The additive MDA approach to analyze textbook listening texts provides detailed insights into the lexical, syntactic, and grammar structures. Researchers can use these findings to compare differences with other corpora to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the corpus. On the other hand, teachers can also use the pedagogical value of the findings to include supplementary authentic listening materials to enhance students’ listening capabilities.

Based on the findings, I argue that applying the additive MDA approach in English textbooks would be of help for teachers, textbook authors, and textbook publishers.