Focus on Frequency: A Comparison of First-year German Vocabularies

Foreign language teachers, experts of pedagogy, and textbook publishers often cite frequency as an important tool in the creation of textbooks, as well as in teaching students a foreign language. These same figures, however, rarely question the application of frequency in these works. This thesis examines the application of frequency over a range of first-year German textbooks compared to a textbook that is explicitly based on a particular frequency dictionary. These textbooks are compared to each other and to the Jones and Tschirner Frequency Dictionary of German and Pfeffer’s Grunddeutsch: Basic (Spoken) German Word List, Grundstufe.