Analysis of a Corpus of Written Recipes to Add Authenticity to EFL Materials

This paper uses a specialised corpus of English written recipes to determine the suitability of vocabulary presented in a textbook lesson. Additionally, it aims to provide data that can be used to inform the design of classroom materials that better exemplify authentic English usage than that presented in the textbook. The corpus is analysed to identify the most frequent verbs in recipes and record frequently occurring patterns of those verbs. The findings are compared with the textbook and suggestions are made for how the data could be used pedagogically. It was found that the vocabulary presented in the textbook did not represent frequently used vocabulary in authentic texts and that the examples of how the vocabulary items are used also lacked authenticity.