Coursebooks or the BNC? Teaching English Verbs and Their Dependent Prepositions

Abstract

The study compares English dependent prepositions of the verbs agree, apply, and die shown in English language coursebooks and a corpus. It also suggests English prepositional verbs and their dependent prepositions that are suitable for teaching to L1 Thai learners and a method that should be employed for the instruction. The data were collected from four English language students’ books used by many upper secondary schools in Thailand and the British National Corpus. The findings demonstrate that the coursebooks offer nearly all of the most frequent dependent prepositions of the verbs with scant sentence examples and collocations, while the corpus reveals more dependent prepositions with numerous sentence examples and collocations. Further, the corpus data provide many noun collocates that can be arranged into themes according to their semantic preferences. It is advisable that the coursebooks and corpus data should be used in Thai EFL class to complement each other. The most frequent constructions should also be taught as phraseology through indirect access to data-driven learning, with suggested inductive activities and examples of simplified key word in context concordances.