A comparatıve corpus-based analysıs of complement ‘-ing’ clauses used ın the bnc and the coursebooks

Abstract

In Turkey, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers have been using the coursebooks in their classrooms as a material. Despite the significance of the coursebooks in the EFL setting, it is contentious that the coursebooks administered by the Ministry of National Education are able to consist of authentic language and prepare learners for real life. Corpora, consisting of written and spoken data gathered from real lives of native speakers, can provide EFL learners and teachers with authentic language. It is possible that complement ‘-ing’ clauses, containing the semantic domains, have an important part in real life. In this regard, this study tried to compare the coursebooks and the British National Corpus (BNC) in the use of complement ‘-ing’ clauses in order to see the frequency, possible overuse and underuse of complement ‘-ing’ clauses in the coursebooks and to understand whether the coursebooks could reflect the language the English use in their real life. The coursebooks were turned into a plain text and compiled by using Key Word in Context (KWIC) software, and Sketch Engine was used to reach the BNC. In an attempt to understand whether there was a statistically significant difference between the corpus of the coursebooks and the BNC and whether there was an overuse or an underuse of complement ‘-ing’ clauses, the log-likelihood (LL) values were utilized. The results revealed that considering the overall frequency, there was a statistically significant difference between the coursebooks and the BNC in the use of complement ‘-ing’ clause. It was also understood that the coursebooks had the absence of lexical diversity although complement ‘-ing’ clauses were overused in overall frequency. This study helps better understand the importance of the use of complement ‘-ing’ clauses and authentic language in the coursebooks. Moreover, it can provide a v perspective in the use of complement ‘-ing’ clause for the designers of the coursebooks and the syllabi in Turkey.