A Comparative Study of Aspects of Vocabulary in the Old and New Official Seventh-grade English and Arabic Textbooks

Foreign language teaching textbooks play an important role in Iran’s Educational system. Vocabulary knowledge, as an important sub-skill contributing to learning foreign languages, is considered as one of important pillars of the four language skills. That being so, this comparative study seeks to uncover those aspects of vocabulary which have drawn the attention of Iranian textbook developers (Arabic and English). The paper also looks into any possible changes from the older textbooks to the more recent ones after the education change with respect to vocabulary. To this end, vocabulary exercises in both sets of seventh-grade textbooks were analyzed employing a checklist which embraced different aspects of vocabulary knowledge and was developed by the current researchers. Descriptive analysis of the findings indicated that the new English textbook has addressed a larger number of aspects although there are yet some aspects which were either neglected or not sufficiently attended. The new Arabic textbook, however, needs more attention to several aspects. The new English textbook, in comparison to the new Arabic one, has more varied and diverse vocabulary aspects. Finally, the study discusses the significance and implications of the findings and suggests that materials developers and teachers take into consideration more varied and complex aspects of teaching vocabulary.