A Study On The Evaluation Framework Of The Activities Of Senior English Course Books

Senior English Curriculum stressed the importance of training students' communicative competence, thinking ability and information literacy. (Educational Bureau 2003)Senior English course books should reflect these new ideologies in the course books' activities. It is through what the students do in their English learning that we can see what a course book stresses. The abilities emphasized in the Curriculum are reflected through three features of activity: cognitive feature, inquiry feature and communicative feature.The present study aims to set up an evaluation framework of activities of senior English course books. The framework focuses on cognitive, inquiry and communicative features of activity. It is expected that the evaluation of activities will help to distinguish senior English course books that can reflect the Curriculum from those that cannot.The present study mainly reviews Bloom (1956), Anderson et al's (2001) study on cognitive process; American National Research Council (1996) and American National Science Foundation's (1999) study on inquiry; Johnson & Morrow's (1981) study on communicative activity. Then the evaluation framework on the three features of activities is set up based on these studies. In the study, cognitive process of activities is simplified into Tier One and Tier Two.Two senior English course books are chosen to test the effectiveness of the evaluation framework. One is Senior English for China (Students' Book 1A) i.e. (SEFC1A), the other is New Senior English for China (Students' Book 1A) i.e. (NSECIA). The present study does not evaluate listening activities because the author cannot get the cassettes and transcriptions of listening materials. The evaluation of reading activities is a content-based study due to its speciality and complexity. Reading activities are evaluated based on content because most of these activities require students to give answers based on the reading passage. Most ofreading activities do not have distinct inquiry and communicative features in the present two course books, so this study only evaluates the cognitive features of reading activities. The remaining activities (i.e. all the activities excluding listening and reading activities) are called major activities. The evaluation of major activities is a corpus-based study. The author read major activities in the two course books and found that these activities reflect their features on the instructional verbs or verb phrases. So evaluating major activities based on corpus is feasible. The author builds up a mini-corpus of instructions of activities of the two course books. Then some instructions are deleted from the corpus. Through reading and identification, listening activities are deleted form the corpus. Reading activities are identified and ?picked up to form another corpus. Then the author adopts Wordsmith 3.0 to make a pilot study. The purpose of the pilot study is to extract instructional words that are related to three features of activities. These words are put in a search word list. They are used as search words to search the corpus. The author reads each instruction carefully and evaluates three features of activities.The evaluation result shows that in SEFC 1A, the percentage of all activities that belong to Tier One is 90.5%; the percentage of all activities that belong to Tier Two is 9.5%. In NSEC 1A, all activities that belong to Tier One is 67.4%; the percentage of all activities that belong to Tier Two is 32.6%. It proves that the activities in SEFC 1A focus more on the practice of linguistic points and grammatical point. NSEC 1A pays more attention on students' comprehensive use of English and it stresses more on students' cognitive development. The percentage of major activities that have inquiry feature is 0.4% in SEFC 1A and 20.1% in NSEC 1A. It indicates that SEFC 1A gives less emphasis on the training of students' inquiry ability. NSEC 1A, however, emphasizes much the training of inquiry ability. As for the communicative feature of major activities, the perc...