This study aims to investigate the vocabulary load in Spine 5 (Sudan Practical Integrated National English, Book 5 ). Studies of vocabulary load are scares in Sudan. So this study will contribute to the improvement of EFL textbooks and material development. The study attempts to examine the characteristic features of the lexical items included in book five : their total number , frequencies , recycling , usefulness for learners , suitability to learners’ level, grading and presentation. The researcher uses from within the descriptive method the content analysis technique. The analysis includes the vocabulary list of Spine 5 teacher’s book, the first three 1000 high frequency word lists from British National Corpus and Spine 5 pupil’s book . Ten words from the most recycled words are selected in order to test spaced recycling of vocabulary. Then the data are classified ,organized, analyzed, discussed and interpreted. The analysis of the new vocabulary items in Spine 5 shows that this textbook reflects a level of difficulty because it contains a large number of low frequency words. There is also a poor provision of new vocabulary items. 43.8 % of vocabulary items have not been recycled and 44.4% words have insufficient recycling. Even those which have sufficient recycling; are not systematically recycled. Massed recycling is performed with very few words. The few words which have spaced recycling are high frequency words; massed recycling is found in all pages of Spine 5 pupils’ book.
Keywords: EFL textbooks, Spine Five, vocabulary load, vocabulary recycling
