A Corpus-based Analysis of High School English Textbooks and English University Entrance Exams in Turkey

This study aims to explore the missing link between English textbooks used in high schools (9th-12th grades) and university entrance exams (2010-2019) Turkey on lexical syntactic complexity levels by using corpus linguistics tools: AntWordProfiler, TAALED, L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA). Official complementary materials obtained from Ministry of National Education have been compared against official past decade. The results show that: (i) differences sophistication level can be observed two corpora, exam was higher than that textbook corpus, (ii) there is a statistically significant difference corpora terms diversity, has significantly diversity (iii) also existed regarding indices. corpus. findings suggest Turkish school students who learn with throughout their years will tackle low-frequency more sophisticated words at time taking nationwide exam. This, return, creates negative backwash effect, distorts approach L2, raises other concerns about misalignment language education exams.