We can clearly see from the above that researches on amplifiers are all the researches on the usage of amplifiers by the English learners. Actually, they often conclude the characteristics of usage of amplifiers by different English learners. However, they seldom turn to the field that whether a textbook is suitable for English learners to learn. They ignore the learning resources. We also have some researches on textbooks. However, the two fields are separate. No researches pay attention to the amplifiers in one particular textbook. Therefore, in this research, amplifier will be a study target in the texts of TCCE. The target amplifiers are: more, very, too, quite, much, far, highly, fully, completely, entirely, extremely, absolutely, totally, strongly, badly, deeply, greatly, altogether, considerably and thoroughly. These amplifiers are the most frequent used amplifiers in native English-speaking countries. (Leech, 2001:345) After the research, the learners will better use the TCCE to learn how to use the amplifiers more accurately and effectively.

3. Research Design

3.1 Research Questions 

From the literature review part, it is concluded that the main researches on amplifiers are almost the similar questions such as how English learners use amplifiers differently from the native English speakers does. They seldom involve the questions like whether a textbook is suitable for English learners to learn how to use an amplifier. Therefore, according to the previous study and this study itself, here come the questions: 1) do the frequencies of amplifiers used in TCCE and BNC show any differences; 2) if there exist some difference, what are the features of the amplifiers used in TCCE?

3.2 Research Materials

This research has employed two corpora.

 The first one is the collection of Reading texts in the TCCE. The TCCE is a set of college English teaching material for two-year college English teaching. This set of books is written according to the published college English syllabus .The texts in this set of books are chosen from the native English-speaking texts. These texts are something about philosophy, biography, education, society, politics, and cultural differences and so on. The words of the texts are about 57913.

The second part is the collection of writings in the British National Corpus (short for BNC). The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. This research mainly uses the writing part of the BNC. The written part in BNC has about 3144 texts and has about 87278205 words.

The chosen amplifiers in this research are: more, very, too, quite, much, far, highly, fully, completely, entirely, extremely, absolutely, totally, strongly, badly, deeply, greatly, altogether, considerably and thoroughly. These words are the most frequent used amplifiers in native English speaking countries (Leech, 2001:571)

3.3Research Method

The research uses the BNC (writing part) as a reference corpus to study the amplifiers in TCCE. The Antconc software is used to search the data. Based on the obtained data, the analysis will be given.