A Corpus-based Study of College English Coursebooks

This study aims to create a college English coursebook corpus of coursebooks widely used in universities in China to form the basis of an analysis. The comparative study based on Cunningsworth [1] coursebook evaluation theory, in view of several checklist items and the adoption of quantitative and qualitative approach, involves: vocabulary size, the coverage of vocabulary and collocations and the readability of texts. The statistics of evaluation show that there is a gap between requirements and coursebooks. It is hoped that the indices examined in this study would be of some help for English teachers to take vocabulary and collocation size and text readability into account in teaching practice and possibly for administrators to adjust curriculum design and for editors or publishers to revise existing coursebooks.