Abstract
Abstract The present study dealt with six textbooks used to teach English in Burundi secondary schools to find out the extent to which phraseology is part of the taught syllabus. The research also aimed at finding out the type of activities provided for learners to practice phraseological units they have been exposed to). Phraseology is presented in textbooks as Multi-word Units (MWUs). MWUs were identified manually, cross-checked in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Online Oxford Collocation Dictionary, recorded and categorized into three main phraseme categories and their subcategories ( Granger and Paquot, 2008: 42; Section 2.4.2.1). The obtained list of MWUs was then concordanced in the textbook corpus, BEGPTC, to verify the exactitude of their frequencies in the corpus. To this end, software AntConc was used. Results from the analysis show that the textbooks present a relatively low number of MWUs. Lexical and Grammatical collocations were shown to be most frequent, while other categories receive less or no attention at all. Activities presented after reading the texts rarely have a direct focus on MWUs. Burundian learners, therefore, are exposed to a limited number of MWUs and do not get enough opportunities to practice the learned MWU. Therefore, teaching materials that promote all the MWU categories and in good numbers are urgently needed for successful phraseology learning.