Beyond Level Labels: Profiling Vertical Grammar Salience in Taiwan’s CEFR-Referencing K

Abstract

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) provides widely used proficiency labels, but these labels do not specify how grammar is materially distributed, sustained, or reweighted across school textbooks. This study profiles vertical grammar salience in Taiwan’s CEFR-referencing K–12 English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbook ecology by examining the relationship between English Grammar Profile (EGP) benchmark placement and textbook distributional salience. The corpus consisted of 57 ministry-approved student books from multiple textbook series across primary, junior-secondary, and senior-secondary stages, comprising 234,134 cleaned English tokens. An EGP-derived inventory of A1–B2 grammar points (GPs; N = 602) was consolidated, operationalized as corpus-queryable patterns, and searched in the textbook corpus. Frequencies were normalized as frequencies per million words, transformed as ln(FPM + 1), and standardized as z scores to estimate distributional input intensity. Two complementary clustering analyses were conducted. Level-based clustering identified within-level salience bands for A1, A2, B1, and B2 GPs, whereas stage-based clustering examined how the attested inventory was redistributed within each school stage. Dispersion across books and persistence across stages were used as interpretive complements to frequency-based intensity. The results showed that 12.9% of the benchmarked A1–B2 inventory was unattested in the corpus, that all four CEFR levels contained internal salience stratification, and that senior-secondary materials displayed a compressed distribution in which the largest group of A1–B2 items fell into the lowest salience band. This senior-stage pattern is interpreted cautiously as possible selective recycling of lower-level grammar, while also allowing for the alternative possibility that A1–B2 items recede within more advanced textual input beyond the study’s inventory. The study contributes a transparent, distribution-sensitive framework for diagnostic review of CEFR-referencing textbook systems. Its findings index materials-based availability and distributional prominence, not instructional salience, classroom enactment, or learner acquisition.

Keywords

CEFR English Grammar Profile textbook corpus grammar salience vertical profiling textbook evaluation clustering diagnostics recurrence dispersion materials design

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Biber

Conrad

Reppen

(1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge University Press.

Biber

Reppen

(2002). What does frequency have to do with grammar teaching? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(2), 199–208. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263102002048

Brezina

(2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics: A practical guide. Cambridge University Press.

Burton

(2022). Grammar syllabus. In Liontas

J. I.

(Ed.), The TESOL encyclopedia of English language teaching (pp. 1–6). Wiley.

Bybee

J. L.

(2006). From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language, 82(4), 711–733. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2006.0186

Bybee

J. L.

(2008). Usage-based grammar and second language acquisition. In Robinson

Ellis

N. C.

(Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 216–236). Routledge.

Celce-Murcia

Larsen-Freeman

Williams

H. A.

(1999). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course (2nd ed.). Heinle & Heinle.

Cohen

(1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20(1), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/001316446002000104

Council of Europe. (2020). Common European Framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Council of Europe Publishing. https://rm.coe.int/common-european-framework-of-reference-for-languages-learning-teaching/16809ea0d4

10.

DeKeyser

R. M.

(2017). Knowledge and skill in ISLA. In Loewen

Sato

(Eds.), The Routledge handbook of instructed second language acquisition (pp. 15–32). Routledge.

11.

Denhovska

Serratrice

Payne

(2016). Acquisition of second language grammar under incidental learning conditions: The role of frequency and working memory. Language Learning, 66(1), 159–190. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12142

12.

Ellis

N. C.

(2002). Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(2), 143–188. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263102002024

13.

Ellis

(2006). Current issues in the teaching of grammar: An SLA perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 83–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/40264512

14.

Evert

Hardie

(2011). Twenty-first century Corpus Workbench: Updating a query architecture for the new millennium. In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2011 Conference. Birmingham, UK, University of Birmingham.

15.

Hair

J. F.

Black

W. C.

Babin

B. J.

Anderson

R. E.

(2009). Multivariate data analysis (7th ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall.

16.

Hawkins

J. A.

Buttery

(2010). Criterial features in learner corpora: Theory and illustrations. English Profile Journal, 1, Article e5. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2041536210000103

17.

Hawkins

J. A.

Filipović

(2012). Criterial features in L2 English: Specifying the reference levels of the Common European Framework (English Profile Studies, Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.

18.

Honnibal

Montani

Van Landeghem

Boyd

(2020). spaCy: Industrial-strength natural language processing in Python [Computer software]. Zenodo.

19.

Khojasteh

Mukundan

(2025). A systematic review of corpus-based methodologies in textbook analyses and evaluation. Language Teaching Research Quarterly, 47, 175–195. https://doi.org/10.32038/ltrq.2025.47.10

20.

Kim

S. K.

Webb

(2022). The effects of spaced practice on second language learning: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 72(1), 269–319. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12479

21.

Larsen-Freeman

(2009). Teaching and testing grammar. In Long

M. H.

Doughty

C. J.

(Eds.), The handbook of language teaching (pp. 518–542). Wiley-Blackwell.

22.

Le Foll

. (2022). Textbook English: A corpus-based analysis of the language of EFL textbooks used in secondary schools in France, Germany and Spain [Doctoral dissertation, Osnabrück University].

23.

Le Foll

. (2024). Textbook English: A multi-dimensional approach (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Vol. 116). John Benjamins.

24.

Ministry of Education. (2021). Curriculum guidelines for the 12-year basic education: English language.

25.

Nelson

(2022). Corpora for English language learning textbook evaluation. In Jablonkai

R. R.

Csomay

(Eds.), The Routledge handbook of corpora and English language teaching and learning (pp. 147–160). Routledge.

26.

North

(2014). The CEFR in practice (English Profile Studies, Vol. 4). Cambridge University Press.

27.

O’Keeffe

Mark

(2017). The English Grammar Profile of learner competence: Methodology and key findings. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(4), 457–489. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.14086.oke

28.

Pienemann

(1989). Is language teachable? Psycholinguistic experiments and hypotheses. Applied Linguistics, 10(1), 52–79. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/10.1.52

29.

Zhang

Bolton

Manning

C. D.

(2020). Stanza: A Python natural language processing toolkit for many human languages. In A. Celikyilmaz, & T.-H. Wen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations (pp. 101–108). Association for Computational Linguistics.

30.

Richards

J. C.

(2001). The role of textbooks in a language program. Cambridge University Press. http://www.cup.org.br/articles/articles_21.html

31.

Richards

J. C.

(2014). The ELT textbook. In Garton

Graves

(Eds.), International perspectives on materials in ELT (pp. 19–36). Palgrave Macmillan.

32.

Tono

(2019). Coming full circle: From CEFR to CEFR-J and back. CEFR Journal: Research and Practice, 1, 5–17. https://doi.org/10.37546/JALTSIG.CEFR1-1

33.

Valverde

G. A.

Bianchi

L. J.

Wolfe

R. G.

Schmidt

W. H.

Houang

R. T.

(2002). According to the book: Using TIMSS to investigate the translation of policy into practice through the world of textbooks. Springer.

34.

Verratti-Souto

Sagirov

Chen

(2025). NLP-powered quantitative verification of the English Grammar Profile’s structure-level assignment. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 45, 109–130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190525100093

35.

Webb

Chang

A. C.-S.

(2015). Second language vocabulary learning through extensive reading with audio support: How do frequency and distribution of occurrence affect learning? Language Teaching Research, 19(6), 667–686. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168814559800

36.

Zhao

Wang

Coniam

Xie

(2017). Calibrating the CEFR against the China Standards of English for College English vocabulary education in China. Language Testing in Asia, 7, Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40468-017-0036-1

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.07 MB

0.00 MB

Beyond Level Labels: Profiling Vertical Grammar Salience in Taiwan’s CEFR-Referencing K–12 EFL Textbooks

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material