ABSTRACT
English L2 speakers’ frequently unidiomatic usage of the high-frequency verb make is often traced back to negative L1 transfer. “Inadequate teaching” however has also been identified as a potential factor. Accordingly this study investigates the representations of make in a crucial source of (mis)information in instructed English language learning settings: Textbooks. To this end all occurrences of the verb make found in the dialogues and audio/video transcripts of 43 textbooks used at secondary school level were extracted and manually annotated. These are compared to the use of make in transcripts of natural conversation. Causative uses delexical collocations pertaining to the semantic field of speech/communication and phrasal verbs involving make are found to be more frequent in natural than in textbook conversation. Potential topic and task effects are discussed. The conclusion points to textbooks’ lack of systematicity in their selection of phraseological units involving make in particular of restricted collocations such as delexical uses and phrasal verbs. It briefly exemplifies how corpus data can be used to improve pedagogical materials by featuring relevant communicative patterns frequently observed in spontaneous conversation.
