It is important that the language in textbooks for foreign language learners reflects the language that the learners would encounter in real life. For this reason, the presence of the thousand most common nouns in two Swedish textbooks in Spanish for upper secondary school is observed in this study. Furthermore, this study aims to examine how these nouns occur in order to determine if their pattern of occurence favours the learning and consolidation of words. The main materials that have been used are A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Davies (2006) and the word search program available in the digital versions of the textbooks. The results show that the presence of the thousand most common Spanish nouns does reflect the frequency information presented in the frequency dictionary but not all thousand nouns are included. It has been concluded that the frequency information that Davies (2006) presents should only be one of many variables to bear in mind when it comes to what words to include in the textbooks since the frequency dictionary is based on a corpus that does not always reflect the type of language a beginner student in Spanish would need. The studied nouns are to a large extent repeated implicitly in the two textbooks. In order for the students to obtain more profound knowledge of words the textbooks would probably need to offer more possibilities for explicit repetition.

The aim of this study is to examine how vocabulary instruction is treated in three different educational materials for the subject of Swedish aimed for the first year of upper secondary school. The guiding research questions are: What kind of vocabulary is selected for instruction? and How are the vocabulary exercises designed? In order to answer the first question, the vocabulary is compared to a corpus of press texts. The analysis shows that the three educational materials differ vastly when it comes to the vocabulary selected: while the books aimed for vocational education focus on words pertaining to political participation and work life, the book aimed for programs preparing for ensuing studies contains low-frequency, sometimes slightly archaic words of marked stylistic value. For the second question, the exercises are classified according to Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. The majority of all exercises in all three books correspond to the category of remembering factual knowledge, which is the least cognitively complex and demanding category of the taxonomy.