TEACHING ADVANCED DISCOURSE: A CORPUS-BASED EVALUATION OF INTERMEDIATE BOOK 2 FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING

Abstract

This study evaluates the pedagogical effectiveness of Intermediate English Book 2 in fostering advanced discourse competence through a corpus-based and natural language processing (NLP) framework. It systematically analyzes linguistic features such as syntactic complexity, clause distribution, tense–aspect usage, and lexical sophistication, mapping these features to proficiency descriptors from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. Findings indicate that the textbook demonstrates strong alignment with B2–C1 (CEFR) and Advanced (ACTFL) levels, evidenced by high sentence complexity, frequent clause embedding, and diverse discourse functions including narration and description. The inclusion of varied genres—scientific, historical, and literary—supports learners’ discourse flexibility and cognitive development. However, the study identifies comparatively limited emphasis on argumentative discourse and potential cognitive overload due to high linguistic density. Overall, the textbook is deemed a pedagogically robust resource that effectively supports the transition from intermediate to advanced proficiency, while highlighting areas for improvement in task design and discourse balance.