Primary English Vocabulary Acquisition Based on Activity Theory and Multi-modal LearningA Case Study on Power up 1 Textbook and PEP Peoples Education Press Textbook

This study compares two English language textbooks, PEP Compulsory Education English Textbook Grade 1 (2023) and Power Up (2019) Level 1, to identify shortcomings in the teaching design of second language vocabulary acquisition and suggest improvement. Previous studies suggest that Knowledge Representation performs as the premise of vocabulary acquisition, and two representing approaches, Symbolic Representation and Embodied Representation, are widely used in vocabulary teaching. The derived Multi-modal Learning method, which uses multiple senses to promote memory, has also received attention and has been applied. This point is confirmed in both textbooks. To better study the whole process of vocabulary acquisition pretended in textbooks, this paper moves to Activity Theory, using the model of the Activity Triangle to describe and explain activities. With the method of Textual Analysis, three core elements - Subject, Object, and Community - appear in the same way in textbook use. However, compared to Power Up 1, the PEP textbook exhibits deficiencies in rule and outcome, leading to suboptimal learning effects. Further research needs to go beyond the text and introduce more methods to investigate the effects of the two textbooks to put forward more practical opinions and suggestions.