Introduction

Every year, hundreds of ESL textbooks are published, however their quality varies so evaluation of these textbooks is a necessity. In this essay, I will evaluate the textbook ‘New Headway Intermediate’ (Soars & Soars 2003), specifically the vocabulary section in unit 6 (see appendix 1), to critique the effectiveness of the vocabulary elements based on the principles of teaching vocabulary. The evaluation will be carried out in terms of the following aspects: target students, vocabulary sections in the textbook, presentation of vocabulary, frequency of vocabulary, level of appropriateness, student engagement, the four strands, recycling and vocabulary strategies.

Main Evaluation

Target Students

Before evaluating the vocabulary sections, it is important to determine the general vocabulary level of the students. The book New Headway Intermediate is targeted at potential CEFL B1 (Council of Europe 2001) students who have passed the A1 level and are able to make conversations, though the depth of the conversations may be limited. Their general vocabulary size is 1,500-to-2,500-word families according to Milton and Alexiou (2009), but this estimation is based on a receptive vocabulary test, which means this vocabulary size is receptive. Therefore, the productive vocabulary size of the target students is smaller (Webb 2008), probably ranging from 1,000 to 1,500-word families. This means that the textbook should help students master the most frequent 3000-word families and develop the vocabulary depth of the most frequent 2000 words.

Vocabulary Sections in the Textbook

The vocabulary is categorised into three themes in task 1, namely food, town and people, and students will learn what words can go with ‘food, town or people’. In other words, this vocabulary section aims to teach students collocations (one aspect of the vocabulary depth) — though these collocations are referred to as weak collocations (Nation 2001) — rather than solely teaching the individual words.

This demonstrates that this textbook has paid attention to formulaic language and attempted to incorporate many formulaic sequences as studies (Vilkaitė 2016; Erman & Warren 2000) revealed that the percentage of formulaic sequences ranged from 41% to 58%, crucial in overall language proficiency. In effect, a variety of formulaic sequences are well-heeded and feature in this textbook, such as verb-noun collocations in unit 3, phrasal verbs in unit 7 and idioms in unit 11 (see the menu of the textbook in appendix 2), making itself effective in teaching formulaic language and teaching English as a whole.

As a result, the vocabulary tasks can develop students’ depth of vocabulary, which in this case means the collocations of food, town, and people. Not only is teaching collocations very useful but this can also help cultivate the students’ awareness of using collocations. For example, they may be inclined to check the collocations of words in the dictionary.

Presentation of Vocabulary

As mentioned above, the vocabulary is presented in collocations, but this is problematic because none of the words are presented in context, be it a sentence or a unified language material. This arrangement, in theory, is not as useful as the alternative. However, owing to two reasons — one is that there are numerous words, of which the students know a large proportion and which may otherwise take too much time if all of them are shown in context; and the other reason is the need of minimal contextual link as thematically linked vocabulary is conducive to vocabulary acquisition, supported by Tinkham (1997) — this task strikes a compromise by applying the three themes to unify the target words, In this case, the majority of the individual collocational adjectives are already familiar to the students, and they can use the three themes to help link the vocabulary. However, this is fine for easy collocations that are composed of simple words, it would not work well with difficult words. As upheld by Nation (2001), contexts are very central to students’ vocabulary learning, especially when the words are unfamiliar.

The presentation of vocabulary has steered clear of semantically-related words that can be much more difficult to learn and are likely to give rise to confusion (Nation 2000). However, even though the word ‘tasteless’ can be confused with ‘tasteful’, it is less likely that ‘tasteless’ is counted as a new word to the students; so, it is acceptable to teach two words together if one of them is already learned.

Frequency of vocabulary

To determine if the target vocabulary is at an appropriate level, the frequency of all the words is investigated. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, Davies 2008), which has quite recent English data, seems a wise tool to use for this purpose, considering the massive amount of data (1 billion words). However, though COCA is a quite balanced corpus, the spoken English data consists of a disproportionate amount of broadcasting spoken language (Liu & Myers 2020), which makes this corpus less representative of real daily language and thereby it is less reliable to use it alone. On the other hand, there is already a useful reference tool available which makes use of massive corpus data (273 billion words), namely the New General Service List (NGSL, Browne 2014). This word list conveniently covers the most frequent 2801 words — nearly as many as 3000 words — and serves as a good reference for the range of vocabulary to be taught in this textbook. Thus, the NGSL will be the main frequency reference, and COCA will only be an aid when the target words are not present in the list.

According to the frequency level, the vocabulary is divided into three frequency range categories as the following table 1 shows.

Table 1 frequency of the target vocabulary

Frequency 0-1500 small, young, university, old, home, tall, shy, long, rich, fast, fresh, home-grown, crowd, modern, busy, expensive, excited, capital, bring, bored, industrial;

Frequency 1500-3000 tasteless, tasteful, plain, frozen, wealth, polluted, agricultural, vegetarian, historic, outgoing, sociable, rude, elderly;

Frequency 3000-5000 delicious, junk, disgusting, starving, antique, cosmopolitan, sophisticated;

Level of Appropriateness

There is a high percentage of high-frequency words. They appear so simple that there is no need to even review them, much less to learn them. However, when looked at from a broader view, it is apparent that this vocabulary section, as mentioned earlier, concentrates on collocations rather than individual words. That explains why it is necessary to learn the collocations as new lexical items.

As the words in the 1500-3000 frequency range start to become a little challenging, they, as individual words, should be taught in more depth, such as teaching the registers and the derivatives. For example, the derivative of industrial, industrialize, can be taught to expand the depth. However, the depth of these words is not expanded in the vocabulary section. This part should be optimised accordingly, though the main focus here is to teach collocations.

Some words do not fall into the most frequent 3000-word category; there are 7 words in the most frequent 3,000-to-5,000-word range. Although the words ‘delicious, junk’ seem more common than the frequency data shows and thereby acceptable, other words are too demanding for the students to master, particularly the words ‘antique, cosmopolitan, sophisticated’. In fact, at least these three excessively difficult words should be excluded from this vocabulary section.

Student Engagement

The engagement of students in the vocabulary section is very high according to the involvement load hypothesis proposed by Hulstijn and Laufer (2001), which divides engagement into ‘need, search and evaluation’ with the scale for each aspect ranging from a score of 0 to 2. To be specific, the first task requires students to differentiate the incorrect collocational adjectives from the correct ones, which necessitates ‘need’ (extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation, so the score for this aspect is 1), ‘search’ (receptive retrieval rather than productive retrieval, so the score for this aspect is 1), and ‘evaluation’ (students need to evaluate whether the adjectives are appropriate but no contexts need to be produced by them, so the score for this aspect is 1), making the task itself efficient in boosting learning. For example, in the food’s collocations, students need to evaluate the appropriateness of all the adjectives because there are some adjectives that make no sense when collocating with food, such as tasteful — tasteful is used to describe something that is of high quality and showing good aesthetic value.

In task 2, a range of fill-in-the-blanks exercises in conversations are provided to consolidate the students’ collocational knowledge, which also feature high engagement. To specify, students need to comprehend the sentences and choose the correct collocations to complete all the sentences, which involves ‘need’ (scoring 1) and ‘evaluation’ (scoring 1) but not ‘search’ (scoring 0 because all words are learned just minutes before this task). Take exercise 3 for example: B said ‘the pizza was ______, we were really ______, but we still couldn’t eat it!’ Although the first blank, at first glance, can be filled with many adjectives, the correct answer can only be a negative word considering the last sentence, so the right answer is ‘disgusting’. A likewise evaluation is needed to get the right answer for the second blank, which is ‘starving’.

Whilst the following ‘listen and check’ and ‘practice the conversations with your partner’ in task 2 do not have high engagement, the task 3 ‘talking about you’ has the highest engagement among all the vocabulary tasks in this section. This is because students need to describe a restaurant, town and people they like, prompting them to score 1 in ‘need’, score 2 in ‘search’ for phonological form needs to be retrieved, and score 2 in ‘evaluation’ for the students not only use the target vocabulary in contexts but also provide the contexts.

The Four Strands

The vocabulary section aligns well with the four strands — “meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development” — that were put forward by Nation (2007: 2).

The language-focused learning strand is well designed. In task 1, all the collocational adjectives are presented in three categories, clearly displaying what adjectives go with what words. In this stage, a phase of language-focused learning, students will consciously pay attention to them and process the language. For instance, they will not only learn the word ‘home-grown’, but learn that this word can be used to describe food.

In task 2 — fill-in-the-blanks exercises and practicing the conversations with a partner — students will have some written and oral practice, yet these two types of practice can hardly be regarded as meaning-focused output as neither task has a strong emphasis on meaning itself but simply requires the students to consolidate what they have learnt — until now, the vocabulary knowledge is still receptive because the words are provided rather than dependent on the students’ recall. In the ‘listen and check’ part, students listen to a recording and check their answers, which does not technically count as proper meaning-focused input but compromised input or simply review. However, this task does have a redeeming feature for it does allow for the ‘fluency development strand’ — students will become more and more fluent in processing the target vocabulary as they practice the vocabulary verbally and become increasingly familiar with them.

In task 3 ‘talk about you’, students need to ask their partners food, town and people related questions and listen to the answers, and reverse their roles later, contributing to their target-vocabulary-incorporated speaking. This task offers a great opportunity to let the students have meaning-focused input and output, as well as a chance to develop their English fluency. Meanwhile, this exercise starts to push the purely receptive vocabulary knowledge to move to productive vocabulary knowledge gradually, as productive knowledge is superior to receptive knowledge and therefore, much more hard work is required to develop the former and it is always acquired after the latter (Schmitt 2014). The reason why the move is gradual is that this change is through a cline (De la Fuente 2006), rather than clear-cut dichotomy.

Recycling and Vocabulary Strategies

Good textbooks need to recycle the knowledge from previous units or chapters, because it makes students encounter the knowledge more times so as to combat vocabulary attrition and promote vocabulary retention, thus advancing learning outcomes (Marefat & Rouhshad 2007). Nation (1990) argued that 5-16 or more exposures are needed to master the vocabulary, and a similar idea was put forward by Erten and Tekin (2008). Thus, regarding exposures, the more, the better (Nakata 2017).

The vocabulary in this unit is generally recycled within the unit. In task 2 in the vocabulary section, students need to reuse some of the target vocabulary to do the fill-in-the-blanks exercises, to consolidate their collocational knowledge. Afterwards, students will listen to a recording to check their answers. Then, to further consolidate the vocabulary knowledge, the students are required to practice the conversations. Until now, the target words have been recycled four times. However, the disadvantage of this task is that there are so few exercises that only a third of the collocations are practiced. In task 3, students will talk about a restaurant, a city and a person they like, which is a very conducive environment for using the vocabulary learned, yet the downside is that this activity is too free to control how many vocabulary items will be recycled. In the following ‘listening and speaking’ section of this unit, some target vocabulary will be recycled but the recycle is far from adequate. Specifically, only four words — ‘exciting, rude, cosmopolitan, busy’ — are used in the listening material. I do believe that the listening material can be optimised to incorporate more target vocabulary.

The vocabulary is not well recycled as well in the rest of the textbook. Indeed, given that each unit talks about a different topic, and the vocabulary is thematically distributed, it is very difficult to recycle the vocabulary well, which makes it a common scenario for textbooks to focus on new items thereby failing to recycle old items (Brown 2011).

As far as the vocabulary strategies are concerned, they are not taught in this section. Through the whole of this textbook, only one vocabulary strategy — inferencing from context — is consistently practiced. For example, in the preceding reading section about global pizza, the meaning of ‘span’ in the sentence ‘After all, McDonald’s Golden Arches span the globe’ needs to be inferred. However, although the textbook touches on word parts in unit 1, other vocabulary strategies such as mnemonics are not featured at all.

Conclusion

Overall, this textbook is effective in teaching vocabulary, which can develop students’ depth of vocabulary as well as their productive knowledge, with high engagement activities; but there are aspects requiring improvement, such as providing more contexts, increasing the extent of vocabulary recycling, and concentrating more on words of appropriate frequency, though admittedly vocabulary is not the defining focus of this textbook. The lesson I learned from this is that vocabulary depth and productive vocabulary knowledge are exceedingly vital to students who are advancing to CEFR B1 level and above — the target group of students for my prospective teaching career — so I should learn to use more effective teaching methods, such as teaching the phrases related to the individual words to learn the ‘lexical environment’, employing more productive approaches to facilitate the integration of language, and utilising more high-engagement activities to bolster learning. Lastly, I hope there will be more perfected English textbooks, as this would greatly benefit ESL students.

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