Lexical Asymmetries in Pakistani ESL Textbooks: Corpus Evidence and Pedagogical Pathways

Abstract This corpus-based study investigates the distribution of lexical verbs (LVs) within Pakistan’s government-mandated English textbooks by analyzing a dataset comprising 79,499 words from the Pakistan English Textbook Bank (PETB). The results identify notable lexical asymmetries, with merely 4% of all LVs (59 lemmas) accounting for approximately 45% of all verb instances. This indicates a concentration of a limited set of verbs, predominantly transactional or general-purpose verbs such as "say," "make," and "tell." Conversely, discipline-specific academic verbs, including "discuss,' 'evaluate,' and "analyse," are infrequently employed, each appearing no more than five times. A comparative analysis with the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpora demonstrates that the verb "say” appears over four times more frequently in PETB than in BAWE and 3.7 times more often than in BASE, suggesting an overreliance on narrative and conversational verbs. Juilland’s dispersion index (D = 0.31) reveals that these verbs tend to cluster in storytelling or anecdotal sections rather than being evenly distributed across expository or academic segments. This lexical imbalance raises concerns regarding the extent to which the textbooks align with the cognitive and linguistic objectives articulated by Pakistan’s National Curriculum Framework (2021). To address this issue, the development of a Pedagogical Verb Index (PVI) is proposed to assist textbook authors in fostering more balanced and academically appropriate verb usage.