Corpus Analysis of English Coursebooks in Terms of Authentic, Grammatical and Lexical Contents

It is a long consensus by now that teaching and learning a foreign language presented some challenges to be overcome by both the language teachers and learners. One of the biggest challenges in foreign language teaching and learning is the abstractness feature of the language. Starting to learn a foreign language at an early age, some young learners are faced to overcome huge challenges in comprehending abstract points of the language. At this point, materials like coursebooks concreting language concepts to young learners have a significant influence on language learning. One common problematic issue shared in many coursebooks is the unnatural, inappropriate and inauthentic language that cannot appropriately represent the target language itself or its culture and cannot also prepare students for real-life situations. Thus, it is widely claimed that coursebooks seem to lack authentic texts representing personal preferences and biases of their writers. Considering the fact that exposing authentic language to the learners seems to be significant in the countries teaching English as a foreign language, using coursebooks presenting authentic language may be crucial. Therefore, this book attempts to respond to the needs of the EFL teachers and curriculum planners who struggle with finding the right kind of coursebook for their language classrooms. As the writers of this book, we firmly believe that a close examination of English coursebooks prepared for the world market may help language teachers and curriculum planners to make corpus informed decisions related to the principles such as originality, authenticity, and naturalness of these materials.