Written vocabulary of Middle school students and textbooks in State and Municipal public schools

Abstract

This paper is an account of the first pilot study that was carried out in support of the Master's-level research in Lexical Studies. The investigation looks at the written vocabulary of Middle school students in municipal and state public schools. Students' written production will be assessed and will be contrasted with the vocabulary of the textbooks they use in class. Relying on the contributions of Linguistic Statistics (BIDERMAN, 1978, 1998) and Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004), we compare and contrast these two universes. Eight writing samples written by students and two textbook texts, including an issue topic were used. The following items were studied in the three textual sources: number of tokens and types, the frequency of the words, the difference between the number of occurrences of lexical and grammatical words, the vocabulary richness and the hapax legomena. Results show that students’ vocabulary richness is similar in the two schools and that there is no diversity of words. When analyzing the twenty most frequent words, we noted that the most frequent words are also present in the issue topic. However, the vocabulary presented in the textbooks is not used by students. The study shows the importance to assess the number of texts to be studied in the different parts of the corpus under study.