The Analysis of Lexical Complexity of Two College English Textbooks

Abstract

The lexical complexity of two college English textbooks are analyzed in this article. Two sets of China’s Twelfth Five-Year National Planned College English Textbooks are selected as the research data, totally 28821 words. The Lexical Complexity Analyzer is applied to the whole lexical complexity and its trend of both textbooks. Generally speaking, the lexical density, sophistication and variation of Textbook B is higher than that of Textbook A. And there are different degrees of differences of texts of both textbooks in the above 3 measure categories of lexical complexity. Moreover, the trend lines of textbook B on the measures of lexical sophistication-II (LS2) and verb sophistication-II (VS2) increase more sharply than textbook A.