AN ANALYSIS OF THE VOCABULARY OF SINGAPORE PRIMARY SCHOOL CHINESE LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS

This article reports the findings of a corpus analysis of the vocabulary of Singapore current primary school Chinese language textbooks. Exclude punctuations, the corpus collected 27,499 Chinese character-tokens, which consolidates into 1,843 character-types. The character-tokens were further consolidates into 19,512 word-tokens and 3,622 word-types. With the character-types and word-types, the corpus calculated the coverage of the high frequency characters and high frequency words at different levels. In addition, comparisons of the character-types and word-types between different levels were being made. With a scientific corpus approach, this study provides insights into the learning of Chinese vocabulary at Singapore primary level, in particular, the coverage of the list of vocabulary across a six-year primary school education.