Lexical Features of the ELA Reader: What words are students exposed to?

This article reports on a study conducted to identify the lexical features of the ELA Reader, the common in-house textbook of the English for Liberal Arts Program at International Christian University. Adopting the corpus linguistics approach, the Reader was analyzed to identify the most frequently appearing words, keywords, lexical variation and proportion of academic vocabulary. Findings suggest that the current selection of articles is generally appropriate though considerable variation is present among individual texts. Several suggestions are made on the criteria for text selection and on helping students developing their repertoire of academic vocabulary.