A Study Of Systemic-Functional Linguistics To English Textbook Design

The traditional English textbooks overemphasize linguistic knowledge and accuracy and integrality in grammar with little concerns to development of the competence for communicative use of language. As a result of it, they can't meet the requirements of language teaching.The contributions systemic-functional linguistics made to foreign language teaching have received acknowledgement with some sort of unanimity. However, seldom researches have been made about its influences on textbook design. This thesis is a tentative in the study to relate systemic-functional linguistics to textbook design and draws a conclusion that a qualified textbook should meet the following requirements:(1) It should center on the development of learners' communicative competence and attach much importance on their four linguistic skills;(2) It should provide learners with adequate input of linguistic knowledge and encourage them making effective selection within the knowledge network according to their needs in communication, so that they can fully exert their subjective initiative and their competence for autonomous learning can be improved;(3) It should develop learners' cross-cultural consciousness and communicative competence;(4) It should select authentic and idiomatic language materials which can meet learners' and social needs;(5) It should pay attention to the teaching in terms of language function;(6) It should cover diversified genres and subjects to enable learners to better realize their communicative goals in reality;(7) It should be flexible and open enough to assure teachers of more room to select the proper teaching or learning methods.(8) Textbook designers should take into full account which variety will be selected, for example, British English or American English as well as teaching language in the authentic context recognizable and accessible to the learners to enable them to use the target language.(9) Textbook designers should make efforts to build up authentic context as possible as they can, so that the learners can learn in a recognizable and accessible context.The above requirements made by systemic-functional linguistics conform to both the principles of functional approach to textbook design and the requirements of the new curriculum standard on textbook.