Profiling Multiword Units in EFL English Textbooks of Vietnamese Tertiary Students

This corpus-based study explores the under-researched area of multiword unit (MWU) use in English textbooks. The study investigates the range of MWUs presented in the reading input and listening input in the English textbooks used within a tertiary-level EFL program in Vietnam. In terms of procedure, MWUs extracted from textbook corpora were automatically identified based on frequency, distributional and statistical score data, prior to manual refinement (following Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010) and rating for pedagogical validity. The results showed that the overall MWU occurrence rate was significantly greater in the listening input than in the reading input. Reading input was found to have used a much larger quantity and also a much wider variety of MWUs than listening input. High frequency spoken MWUs were found to have a higher frequency count than high frequency written ones. The present study also found that MWUs specific to listening input appear to have a personal and interactional nature, characteristic of the oral input. Referential expressions are the most commonly used category in both reading input and listening input, whereas discourse organizers seem to be exposed to a lesser extent compared to both referential and stance expressions. In terms of the cost-benefit advantages that high-frequency vocabulary can afford, spoken MWUs may deserve more teaching time and attention in language teaching. EFL teachers should be made aware of the discrepancy of function use in listening input and reading input texts.