Criteria for selection of textbooks and exercises

The first criterion established for choosing the textbooks was that the vocabulary exercises in the books should be presented separately from the grammatical ones. This can be challenging since, as Sinclair & Renouf maintain, „it is almost impossible to teach grammar without in passing teaching some vocabulary. Vocabulary fleshes out the structures, introduces variety and promotes practice of the structure in question‟ (1988:143). However, considering that the

4 Although Targets’ edition is from 2005, it has been used in Norwegian schools until 2009 when a new edition was published. It has probably been adopted for so long for meeting many of the requirements of L06.

present study is concerned with lexis, the exercises used should work essentially with

vocabulary. The @cross material, for example, is very clear in its categorization, placing the lexical and grammatical exercises in different sections („building vocabulary‟ and „learning grammar‟ respectively), which is why @cross was chosen. Below is an example of a vocabulary exercise from @cross.

190 Write a paragraph describing American teenagers and their situation using the following words.

Sports, prom, weird, wired, bullying, committed, frustrated, happy, shopping, trend, cliques Add other words from the texts which you think fit in.

Figure 3.1 Example of a vocabulary exercise from @cross (Rogers et al. 2006b:111)

Passage, Experience, and Targets have vocabulary and grammar exercises mixed, which posed a problem for deciding on the second book. The solution was to look at their websites to see if the vocabulary exercises were clearly labeled as such there. Having found that in all three websites they were categorized as working on vocabulary, another criterion was needed as a means to select only one of them. Searching the three websites, it was found that Targets and Experience have too many vocabulary exercises, and it would not be possible to analyze all of them due to time restrictions. Therefore, the ones decided upon in the end were Passage and @cross. It is worth noting that only two textbooks have been selected in order to limit the scope of the study.

After choosing the two textbooks, certain criteria have been adopted to select the vocabulary exercises. Since the first aim involves finding out if words that are usually taught as separate items in textbook exercises are part of collocations in the texts they are taken from, the exercises should present lists of single decontextualized words, like the one from

@cross in figure 3.1. Thus, collocation and gap-filling exercises, as exemplified respectively in figure 3.2 and figure 3.3, were excluded.

Figure 3.2 Collocation exercise from Passage (Sørhus et al. 2006b)

Figure 3.3 Gap-filling exercise from Passage (Sørhus et al. 2006b)

It is necessary at this point to highlight that the two types of exercise above are highly recommended by several authors for vocabulary practice (Brown 1974; Stevick 1976;

Nattinger 1988). Therefore, it is unfortunate that both textbooks offer remarkably few of these in its vocabulary section and that most of its exercises work with words in isolation.

Regarding only collocation exercises, @cross includes none while Passage has only three.

Nation explains that teaching vocabulary using lists of words out of context is probably effective for „learners with a small vocabulary who wish to go on to academic study in a few months‟ time‟ (1990:2); which is not the case of Norwegian students at the level in question.

At the first year of upper secondary school, students have been studying English for ten years (they usually start in first grade), so they have probably acquired a sizable vocabulary, and they still have at least two years until entering university.

Vocabulary exercises that work with proper names and names of geographical places or events (shown in figure 3.4 below) were also excluded. The reason is that the objective of these activities seems to be more to remember factual information from the texts than to test general vocabulary knowledge.

101 Word Search

Find the words in the grid.

Arsenal, Covent Garden, Oxford Street, Big Ben, Ealing, Parliament, Camden Market, Globe, Tower of London, Chelsea, Greenwich, Tube, City, Heathrow Airport, Westminster, Downing St,

Buckingham Palace, Soho.

Figure 3.4 Exercise with geographical names from @cross (Rodgers et al. 2006b)

After excluding the types of activities discussed above, there were exactly fourteen single word vocabulary exercises from each material, all of which were used in the present study.

Table 3.1 below shows the types of exercises selected and the number of each type.

Table 3.1 Number and types of vocabulary exercises from each material

Type of exercise @cross Passage Total

Matching synonyms, antonyms, or words and their definitions 4 13 17

Involving Norwegian translation 6 1 7

Using certain words to write a text 3 - 3

Finding words in grids 1 - 1

Total 14 14 28

All of these types of exercises, except the one to write a text, belong to the fourth step in the vocabulary acquisition process mentioned by Hatch & Brown (1995; see section 2.3); namely, consolidating word form and meaning in memory. The type in which students need to write a text with certain words requires that students use the words, which is the last step in the acquisition process. More examples of the types of exercise that were selected for investigation will be given in the @cross and Passage subsections below.

3.2.2 @cross

The @cross material consists of:

textbook workbook teacher‟s book 8 CDs

website

For the purposes of this thesis mainly the workbook and the textbook have been used. The material was developed by Drew Rodgers, Knut Skifjeld, Dilys Brown, & Martin Mulloy and published by Damm. @cross targets Norwegian pupils specifically, often contrasting Norway with the English speaking world. Regarding the variety of English used, it includes both American and British English, depending if the text is about the USA or the UK. The book also brings other varieties like Australian, Jamaican, and South African English.

@cross is divided into four parts: „@cross the UK‟, „@cross the English speaking Countries‟, „@cross the USA‟, and „@cross Literature‟. Part 1 is subdivided into eleven chapters that cover different regions of the United Kingdom, including cultural and historical information about them. Part 2 has only three chapters, which talk about Jamaica, South Africa, and New Zealand. Part 3 contains twelve chapters that describe various states and

cities in the United States, and provide historical and cultural facts. With reference to genres, it is stated in the preface of @cross textbook that „you will find a combination of two teaching traditions – storytelling and factual articles‟ (Rodgers et al. 2006a:5). Thus, the texts in each of these three parts are in the form of storytelling, with young characters experiencing the English speaking world. At the end of each chapter, there is a section called „fact files‟ which gives extra factual information about what was presented in that chapter. The authors explain that the idea is to give pupils the opportunity to choose the type of text that suits them best, taking into consideration students‟ different learning styles (Rodgers et al. 2006a: ibid.). The other kinds of genre the book includes appear in Part 4 of the textbook. This last part is concerned with literary texts ranging from the 1500s until today, as required by the new curriculum. Whereas the texts in the three first parts are written for the purposes of teaching English to Norwegian students (i.e. constructed texts), the texts in the literature section are authentic (i.e. written for English speakers) and taken from a variety of genres, including poems, short stories, and excerpts from novels.

The textbook contains only texts, while the workbook and the website provide all the exercises. The authors state that they „have included tasks covering communicative, cultural, numeric and digital skills‟ (Rodgers et al. 2006a:6). These kinds of activities are grouped in each chapter in the workbook under the headings: „geography‟, „fact file‟, „the journey‟,

„learning grammar‟, „building vocabulary‟, „reading skills‟, „writing skills‟, „speaking skills‟,

„numeric skills‟, „society and culture‟, „making a presentation‟, „listening skills‟, and

„wordbank‟. All the vocabulary exercises selected in the present study are in the „building vocabulary‟ section, which contains from one to three exercises in each chapter.

Since all the activities are in @cross workbook, this is my main source of material. The vocabulary exercises on the website are not clearly categorized and there are very few of them, which is why the website has not been used. In total, fourteen vocabulary exercises have been selected and they are mainly of the types:

1. Correlating English words with Norwegian translations 2. Translating a list of words

3. Linking English words with their synonyms or antonyms 4. Matching words with their definitions

5. Using a range of words to write a paragraph on a determined topic

6. Finding words in a grid (only those that provided a list of English words to be found have been chosen; vocabulary exercises with grids but no lists were excluded.)

This list is more detailed than the one in table 3.1, where the categories were generalized. As stated in the criteria subsection, what all of these exercises have in common is that they present lists of single words to be worked with. A few of them had a collocation or two, in that case the collocation was not searched in the corpus. Below is an example of type 3:

36 Match the word in the left hand column together with the word which means roughly the same, from the right hand column. If you need help, look at pg [sic] 41 - 44 in @cross Textbook. There you will find the words used.

1. coastal a. national costume 2. apply to b. proof

3. generally c. along the seaside 4. stunning d. normally/commonly 5. kilt e. outskirts

6. soundtrack f. 100 years 7. century g. seek admission 8. preserved h. fabulous/fantastic 9. suburbs i. taken care of/looked after 10. evidence j. music to set the mood

Figure 3.5 Exercise to match synonyms from @cross (Rodgers et al. 2006b:34)