Implementation Of The Corpus Analysis Of The Lexis Contained In An English Reading Book With The Aim Of Pre-Teaching Vocabulary

Abstract

This research aims to deal with a well-known problem in English language teaching: reading comprehension. The low comprehension level in EFL learners can be provoked for different reasons, but the lack of vocabulary knowledge is one of the most common. For this reason, this study proposes a corpus analysis of a reading book in order to identify the most frequent relevant words that appear in the text using the Lextutor program. Once the keywords list is obtained, seven sessions are planned to pre-teach this vocabulary before reading the book. To this purpose, various strategies are applied, such as guessing from context, word formation, antonyms and synonyms and mnemonics, among others. After that, the students have two months to read the storybook by themselves. Then, in order to assess this proposal, a checklist is applied after the first month to verify the students’ level of comprehension during the reading process. Finally, at the end of the reading, three task-based assessments are posed to test if pre-teaching the vocabulary had an impact on the learners’ reading comprehension.