BRANDON KRAMER -

THE VOCABULARY OF EXTENSIVE READING: A CORPUS ANALYSIS OF GRADED READERS : CURRICULUM AND MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT

Despite their frequent inclusion within the same student libraries, the methods of "grading" graded readers differ by publisher, making it difficult to compare different books and series. To help address this issue, I will outline the creation of a database of 1,872 graded readers containing 16,448,662 tokens from a wide range of publishers and difficulty levels. First I will discuss the results of single-word vocabulary coverage analyses, which utilized three frequency-based general service lists (New GSL, Brezina & Gablasova, 2015; NGSL, Browne et al., 2013; BNC/COCA Lists, Nation, 2020) and a difficulty-based word list for Japanese learners (SEWK-J, Pinchbeck, 2023). Next I will present the results of multi-word vocabulary analyses which compare the n-grams present in graded readers with those in the COCA as well as the Phrasal Verbs (PHaVE) (Garnier & Schmitt, 2015) and Phrasal Expressions (PHRASE) (Martinez & Schmitt, 2012) pedagogical lists. Although the single-word analyses produced more mixed results, graded readers tended to include the most pedagogically important MWEs and phrasal verbs. Overall, the results suggest that these books are a good means of exposing students to useful vocabulary. Pedagogical implications will be explored in addition to possible directions for future studies.

Brandon Kramer earned his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and taught English in Japanese high schools for seven years before working at the university level. His primary research interests are vocabulary learning, corpus linguistics, language testing, and when possible the intersection of all three.