A Study of Listening Activities and Language Features in the Listening Sections of the Korean Middle School English 3 Textbooks

Objectives This study examined the types of listening activities along with the number of listening exercises, syntactic features and lexical features in five English textbooks by Korean third-grade middle school students. Methods The English listening activities were grouped based on 20 criteria broadly categorized as either picture or text. SPSS 23 was employed to analyze the distribution, frequency, and percentages of listening activities and WordSmith 9.0 was used to assess syntactic and lexical features in all listening scripts. Results The total number of listening questions in the textbooks ranged from 64 to 88. Detailed analysis showed that one textbook had a high proportion of picture-based activities, with 68 of 88(77.3%), while another textbook had a high proportion of text-based activities with 63 of 76 (79.7%). The number of sentences for the five textbooks ranged from 521 to 629 sentences. In terms of word length, averages ranged from 2.71 to 3.98 characters. In addition, the words per sentence averaged between 6.4 up to 8.26 words per sentence. The study identified that the quantity of listening activities as well as syntactic and lexical features in the textbooks differed considerably from one another. Conclusions Results from this research may serve three valuable purposes. First, results provide valuable insights for teachers and researchers about the similarities and differences between the textbooks. Second, based on the insights into nature and types of listening activities in the textbooks, teachers can develop supplemental materials that align with their curriculum needs. Finally, the outcome might aid in harmonizing the types and number of listening activities, as well as the syntactic and lexical characteristics in future editions of the textbooks.