Diss. Uppsala universitet, 2006.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2001--Jena.

The aim of this study is to examine the word acquisition, focusing on the nouns and word exercises, in two Swedish textbooks for German in the upper secondary school. The chosen method for investigating the nouns was corpus analysis. The noun frequency and distribution in the textbooks were analysed and discussed in relation to research in second language acquisition. The Involvement Load Hypothesis by Batia Laufer and Jan Hulstijn was used to examine the exercises in the textbooks. The study showed that most nouns only occurred once in the textbooks, but the most frequent nouns were well spread in the textbooks. Most nouns had however a very low frequency, which does not favour implicit learning by reading. The exercises got mostly low scores in the analysis. This correlated with the fact that most exercises were not productive. The conclusion is that the textbooks didn’t support word acquisition through implicit learning very well and that most exercises are primarily designed to support receptive knowledge and use of vocabulary and not productive.

Inaug.-Diss.--Bonn. / Added t.p., with thesis statement, inserted.

Zugl.: Siegen, Univ., Diss., 2008

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.

Zugl.: Hamburg, Univ., Diss., 2004

Thesis--Fachbereich Neuphilologie. _ Index.

Thesis--Philosophische Fakultät: Münster: 1963. _ Bibliogr. p. 351-360.

The aim of this study is to give insight into the word class nouns presented in the first level of the graded readers series Vamos a leer and the textbook Gracias 8, both teaching materials aimed at the secondary school in Sweden. More precisely, the following questions have been considered: (i) To what extent is the selection of nouns in the texts based on frequency criteria? (ii) To what degree does the noun occur enough times to gain knowledge of the word through incidental learning? (iii) Is there any difference between the graded readers and the textbook in terms of frequency and repetition of the nouns? To answer these questions, a corpus with all occurring nouns based on the texts of the two teaching materials has been compiled. The analyses show that regardless of the teaching material, the selection of nouns is partially based on frequency criteria, but also that there are insufficient repetitions to ensure that incidental learning through reading occur.