A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the degree of "Licence en Langue et Littérature Anglaises"

RESUME,

The present study accesses the English curriculum in scientific sections in Burundi Schools.It consists of three aims.The first aim is to know where words students from in teams of their frequency.With the advent of computers,words are now classified into word bands following their frequency.The second aim is to know whether the words students from scientific sections are exposed to vary according to class level.
The third aim is to know the nature of words contained in scientific course materials,i.e.frequent versus academic words.
In order to achieve these aims,all the texts included in scientific text books were analysed using lextutor through is vocabulary profilers programmes (VP-Compleat and VP -classic).The results reveal that the majority of words included in scientific course materials come from the first three frequency bands namely K1,K2 and K3.This finding supports previous studies which suggest that frequent words should be explicitly taught (Nation,2001,Cobb,2007).In addition,the results show that variation along class level is not consistent and does not seem to have one of the criteria for selecting words to include in text books.Finally,the results indicate K1 and K2 represent by far the majority of words included in scientific course books while the academic words are very few.This finding sustains the position of previous researchers who found that high-frecquent vocabularies are the the words which appear in all types of text and may cover more than 80% of running text (Nation,1990,Nation 2001).