LEXICAL DENSITY AND GRAMMATICAL PATTERNS IN ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS: A CORPUS BASED COMPARATIVE STUDY
Keywords:
Comparative Analysis, English Textbooks, Grammatical Pattern, Investigation, Lexical Density.Abstract
This paper is an outcome of the investigation of grammatical pattern along with lexical density of the English textbooks and comparative analysis of the English textbooks in the 9th grade State textbooks in Punjab and English text books in the first year of English O- level course. Utilizing SketchEngine corpus analysis tool, the analysis tool gathered and compared the texts of 18,450 words of the 9th grade chapters and 21,340 words of the O-level chapters in comparison of linguistic sophistication within compatibility and maturity matters in terms of education as compared. The research methodology relied on the quantitative aspects of the frequency of local words, noun, adjective and adverb, and grammatical complexity such as simple clause, compound clause and complex clause. The test results indicated that they were highly variable and they could be correlated to the various levels of education with the O-level text books showing moderate increase in lexical density (3.5 per cent increase successively; 43.5 per cent, and 40.0 per cent) as well as a significant increment in the usage of complex clauses (6.2 per cent to 12.1 per cent). The use of the academic language has increased by 65 percent (at 7.4 percent and then 12.2 percent of use), and sentence complexity has advanced with average of 28 percent. The shift in genre distribution was towards expository-major (35%) curriculum as compared to narrative-major (40%) curriculum content signifying neat curriculum construction in general analysis discourse. The findings confirmed the systematization possibility of linguistic sophistication across the stages of the second level of learning and the reality of effective language learning textbook development to teach students abstract language aspects and the feasibility of corpus-based solution as the technique of educational text analysis.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Saqib Javed, Marya Sarwar, Shahbaz Ali (Author)
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