Pakistani Textbooks and Native English Corpora: A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Lexical Collocations

The present study aims at investigating the frequency of the types of collocation in Pakistani Intermediate textbook and comparing it with that of the selected corpora – BNC and COCA. To achieve the objectives of the study, a corpus of English textbook (CETB) was compiled. The study used the text analysis tool AntConc 3.2.1 to find the frequency of the collocations in the textbook so that they can be compared with BNC and COCA. The findings of the study show that the textbook presents a high frequency of some collocations which are very rarely used by the native speakers and there are some combinations of words that are not found in the reference corpora. Moreover, the results of the study revealed that Pakistani intermediate textbook does not repeat the collocations in a systematic way so that they can be the part of students’ language. Thus, the study suggests that the syllabus books need either to be revised or changed in order to help language learners improve their language skills.