The treatment of phraseology in ELT textbooks

The present paper has been conducted in the framework of a five-year research project entitled ‘Foreign language learning: phraseology and discourse’, currently carried out at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL), UCL, Belgium. The authors’ research focus is on the phraseological aspects of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning and teaching at an advanced level. After a brief overview of current phraseological trends in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), corpus studies and English Language Teaching (ELT), the paper sets out to investigate the treatment of phraseology in general advanced EFL textbooks. A 220,000-word corpus of advanced EFL textbook material, TeMa, has been collected and analysed with the double aim of presenting an overall picture of current practice in advanced ELT textbooks and of suggesting new avenues for improving the treatment of phraseology.