大學英文原文教科書與高中英文教科書之文本差異探究：東南亞及東北亞四國跨國比較

In the process of globalization, English has established itself as an academic lingua franca worldwide. English-medium textbooks are widely used at universities in non-native English-speaking (NNES) countries. As these English-medium textbooks are mainly written for English native speakers, there is doubt whether students in the NNES countries are equipped with the abilities to comprehend these English-medium textbooks when they enter college. In particular, it is unclear whether the text features of the English language textbooks the NNES students are exposed to at senior high school match those of the English-medium textbooks used at college. In a previous research project, the researcher focused on the senior high school English textbooks of Taiwan, adopting a corpus-based approach to compare the text features of high school English textbooks with those of college English-medium textbooks in two academic domains: natural sciences and engineering as well as social sciences and humanities. This study extended the scope of the research by including high school English textbooks from four more Asian NNES countries: Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Comparisons of the text features between high school textbooks and college textbooks were made in four aspects: readability, lexical diversity, lexical coverage, and Biber's (1988) multidimensional analysis scores. The results reveal that the senior high school English textbooks of the five countries differed significantly from college English-medium textbooks in various textual aspects and the differences were shared among countries. The findings suggest that sole exposure to high school English textbooks cannot well prepare students in these five NNES countries for dealing with and comprehending the texts in the college English-medium textbooks.