Evaluating Arabic textbooks: A corpus-based lexical frequency study

Textbooks play an essential role in foreign language programs; however, it is unclear if their contents match the most salient linguistic forms championed by usage-based approaches to second language acquisition (SLA). Through the lens of a corpus-based approach via lexical frequency, this study evaluates five of the most popular Arabic textbooks. Vocabulary was vowelled and lemmatized using the MADAMIRA morphological analyzer and compared to the first 3,000 most frequent words from A frequency dictionary of Arabic using AntWordProfiler. Results show a relatively low number of items at each frequency band, and subsequent recommendations are made for filling lexical gaps in Arabic and L2 textbooks.