グレィディッド・リーダーの語彙と文法

Abstract

Words and verb phrases found frequently in the three graded readers, Macmillan Readers, Oxford Bookworms and Penguin Readers were examined in this paper. Computer-readable English texts were compiled from forty-three graded reader level 6 texts, and inputted into the WordSmith Tools V.6 to produce a frequency-based wordlist. 2332 frequent words extracted from the wordlist covered 88.98% of all tokens and 22.01% of all types in the forty-three English texts. A comparison of the 2332 frequent words with the JACET8000 revealed that most of these were also in the first 6000 words of the JACET8000, and all but three words were found frequently only in several GR English texts. While all of the forty-three texts were chosen from the GR level 6 texts, they were not identical in terms of the number of average types and the occurrence of perfect verb phrases in the texts. Although the past perfect is grammatical structure allowed in GR level 5 or higher texts, the occurrence of this verb phrase varied among the examined GR level 6 texts.