Corpus analysis of primary one science textbooks for designing ELT materials

Abstract

To make use of words or lists of words in various forms for various purposes is not new. We have been using lists of vocabulary words for tourists and students from various levels of education in the form of glossaries, lists of jargons, indexes and the like. Such lists are called corpus.The government’s recent policy on the teaching of Science in English calls for a fundamental support from language practitioners and researchers of these fields. Here, we highlights some important issues regarding the use of English as the medium of instruction for the teaching and learning of Science in primary schools. Among others, the language issue related to the lexical, syntactic and semantic patterns of English in Science and Technology (EST) has been ‘under-researched’. This, therefore, sets the focus of our study which undertakes to examine the language patterns existing in science authentic texts. Among the many conventional methods that can be adopted, such as functional-notional @ communicative method (Wilkins, 1976), structural @grammar approach (Chomsky, 1965), procedural approach (Prabhu, 1987) or instrospective and retrospective methods (Pressley and Afflerbach, 1995) which often times are limited and unsystematic, we propose to employ the method which involves the making of corpus of this subject area using lexical approach (Lewis, 1994). The lexical approach (Lewis, 1993; Willis, 1990, Willis & Willis, 1988, 1989) is chosen for a number of reasons: 1) it emphasises on the importance of co-text (i.e. language is not de-contextualised), 2) it provides a range of awareness-raising activities that direct the learner’s attention to chunks text composed, 3) it focuses on different forms of lexical item. The corpus produced can then be used by other researchers in this area for teaching and learning purposes. In this paper, we will discuss the preliminary stage of an ongoing research which aims to design teaching and learning materials through an analysis of a corpus of texts taken from Science textbooks for Primary One students in Malaysia. The topic of our research is ‘EST Teaching and Learning Materials via WWW Based on Corpus Analysis of Mathematics, Science and English Text Books in Malaysian Primary Schools’. This paper, however, only focuses on the use of the frequency list and corpus of Science texts to develop teaching and learning materials for English language learners of Primary One students.