Dissertation analysis of phraseological content in English teaching: materials and teachers’ attitudes

5.1.3 Comparison between textbooks regarding students’ learning levels 
Ideally, we expected to find significant differences with respect these two books. 
There is a difference of three levels between them, thus, one (Bridges I), in principle, should 
be far higher in phraseological content than the other (English Alive 3), since they are 
supposed to follow a gradual process. 

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We are going to compare the results obtained for each category in the previous 
subsections with the purpose of highlighting the dissimilarities among them: 
ENGLISH ALIVE! 3 BRIDGES I 
IDIOMS 
NUMBER 
FOCUS 
SKILL 
IDIOMS 
NUMBER 
FOCUS 
SKILL 
Communicative 6 Writing 0 
Communicative 9 Writing 1 
Linguistic 11 
Reading 5 
Linguistic 33 
Reading 7 
17 
Other 0 
Listening 1 
42 
Other
0 
Listening 3  
Speaking 0 
Speaking 1 
Other 11 
Other
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As we can observe, we find a higher number of idioms in first year of Bachillerato 
than in third year of compulsory education. In Bridges I, as commented before, we saw there 
were specific and systematic exercises devoted to these phraseological units for the students 
to come into contact with them. However, these items were made reference basically from a 
linguistic point of view and not used or practiced in communicative o real situations in which 
students may learn how to make use of them. As far as English Alive 3 is concerned, we see 
that the number of idioms is reduced and that this phraseological category is not devoted 
special attention. As explained above, we just found idioms in two specific units (1, 8). It is in 
this unit 8 where idioms, or more specifically, similes, were efficiently worked from a source 
text. However, two units, from our point of view, it is not enough to let students reach a good 
phraseological competence. We strongly believe that students must be exposed to idioms 
from the very beginning of their learning process. Maybe, these idioms can be increased in 
complexity and opacity while passing levels but learners, without a doubt, have to be 
immersed in a context of constant idiom occurrences in order to familiarize with them and 
start integrating them in their own speech. 
Moving on to the next section, we find these two charts for collocations: 

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