Recently there has been a big emphasis on communicative competence. Therefore, fluency is considered important. In the Lexical Approach, it is essential for L2 learners to be familiar with collocations because it helps them to understand English language better and speak more properly. The Lexical Approach is to focus on lexical units, not grammar, which makes meaningful chunks. Corpus-based language studies have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to the development of computer technology. Corpus studies have made it possible to have access to a huge database which native speakers actually use. There has been much research on textbooks, but limited on analysis of collocations. To be able to use accurate and natural English, L2 learners should be exposed to authentic materials. Textbooks are crucial for L2 learners in learning English so textbooks should contain authentic information. Therefore, it is important to verify which vocabulary is used and how collocations are presented in the textbooks.
The purpose of this study is to compare and analyze high-frequency verb collocations in Korean elementary school textbooks which are revised in 2009 to see how well it reflects authenticity with native elementary school students in USA and Canada as well as British National Corpus (BNC).
For this study, Corpus from 12 textbooks was constructed and corpus from 30 USA and Canadian students' interview recordings were compiled. Also BNC was chosen as a native corpus to clarify how well the textbooks deal with high frequency collocations of native corpus.
Korean elementary textbooks and native elementary students' corpus data were analyzed by WordSmith 5.0 program.
To begin with, 15 of the highest frequency verbs and collocations were extracted by using Wordlist function in WordSmith Tools 5.0.
Secondly, among the extracted highest frequency verbs, some were eliminated even though their frequency number was high because they were used as auxiliary verbs or are not used as a collocation. Therefore, in the top 15 high frequency verbs, go, play, and, get were chosen to be analyzed in comparison between Korean elementary textbooks and native students.
The results of this study shows that collocations in Korean elementary textbooks are also seen in native students' collocations as well as in BNC. However, it made quite a few differences in comparison. For example, the usage of the word 'play' was used many times with nouns in Korean elementary textbooks specificly with sports and instruments. However, a lot if times in native students' collocation results, the word 'play' was used with preposition phrases and nouns such as 'play with friends' and 'play games' Therefore, Korean elementary textbooks appear to be lacking in authenticity.
On the basis of the above results, there are three suggestions for effective corpus-based collocation learning.
First of all, English textbooks must contain authentic content because they are the main source of information that is taught to the students in class. In order to make more authentic textbooks, high frequency collocations based on corpus data should be the top priority to be considered.
Next, there should be proper help for English teachers to apply corpus-based data in class. It is necessary for teachers to be aware of the positivity of a corpus-based class. Using corpus-based data will lead to improved and more effective communicative competence.
Finally, students can design their own learning material by using corpus data. In this way, they can focus on individual needs and what they are interested in.
Corpus-based collocation learning has been suggested as a useful resource for L2 learners as it is an authentic material which native people actually use in every day life. There is no doubt that corpus-based collocation learning will help Korean elementary students to be able to have fluent and natural communicative competence.