| Abstract [eng] |
This study investigates the lexical characteristics of seven English graded readers used in Kazakhstan. It evaluates how effectively they support vocabulary learning for intermediate EFL learners. The research is based on a corpus-driven approach and uses self-compiled corpus of 246,969 tokens taken from seven graded readers. The aim of the study is to examine vocabulary used in graded readers, and to see whether the vocabulary in these books reflects general English. To achieve the aim of the study, the study combines four analytical procedures: single-word analysis, collocation analysis, vocabulary profiling, and readability analysis. The single-word analysis focuses on the most frequent nouns, verbs, and adjectives and compares them with the BNC2014Fiction. The BNC2014Fiction is chosen as general English representation. The results show that verbs have the strongest overlap with general English and provide learners with frequent and communicatively useful vocabulary. Adjectives also show moderate overlap, while the nouns show the weakest overlap. The nouns have the lowest overlap, because many of the most frequent nouns are proper name and story-specific items. The collocation analysis focuses on frequent verb+ noun combinations with make, do, give, take as, well as adjective+ noun combinations with good. The results show that the graded readers contain natural and repeated collocational patterns. The VP Profiler results show that all seven graded readers rely heavily on high-frequency vocabulary. In each graded reader, K1 and K2 words account for more than 94 percent of the lexical content. This suggests that the graded readers are generally accessible for intermediate learners and suitable for fluent reading. Moreover, some books contain more off-list vocabulary and higher lexical, which might make them slightly more demanding than others. The GSE Teacher Toolkit supports this finding by showing that most books are aligned with the B1+ level and remain relatively stable in readability. To sum up, the findings show that graded readers used in Kazakhstan are useful for supporting vocabulary learning and reading fluency. |
