An Evaluaiton Study On Language Contents And Task Design In Integrated English Course

The college English coursebook is becoming more and more significant in the wholeprocess of English language learning and teaching in China. As a major tool in theimplementation of the English course as well as the syllabus, coursebooks not only providethe teachers with stimulation and ideas for the organization of teaching activities, but alsooffer the students the reference source on the acquisition of language knowledge and theimprovement of language skills. With the rapid development of English learning and teaching,a rich variety of coursebooks for English majors are published in the market and adopted inplenty of universities and colleges. The evaluation on them is vital to identify theirdeficiencies and weaknesses for their future improvement and optimum use.Many researches have been carried out on materials evaluation since1980s. Manyscholars abroad have designed a large number of criteria and checklists or at least somecheckpoints in accordance with their evaluation thoughts. However, theories figured out byoverseas experts cannot be adopted indiscriminately to evaluate English materials for Chineseusers. To construct the materials evaluation framework, one should take the current situationsof college English education reform and the needs of Chinese users into consideration. Thecurrent domestic study of materials evaluation is still in its beginning stage. There is very fewevaluation frameworks directed against college English materials, and especially very fewsystematical studies based on evaluation of English coursebooks for English majors.Moreover, the research methodology is mainly qualitative in the previous limited studies.Therefore, it is well worth conducting an empirical study in this field.Based on theoretical foundation and statistical analysis, this thesis focuses on theevaluation of a widely-adopted coursebook used by college English majors in China forcomprehensive English course, namely An Integrated English Course (compiled by HeZhaoxiong, et al., published in2005by the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press)(hereinafter referred to as IEC). With the help of questionnaires that record students’ viewsand interviews with experienced teachers, this study intends to evaluate the textbook from twoaspects—the detailed language items and the task design, and provide answers to the following research questions:(1) Whether the language items and task design in IEC are compiled according to thenew syllabus for English majors.(2) Regarding the language items, whether they can cultivate in students a soundlanguage base.(3) Related to the task types, how efficiently they can promote communicative use of thelanguage learnt and how well they meet learners’ needs.(4) What are the strengths and weaknesses of language items and task design in IEC.In order to answer these questions, this research applies both quantitative and qualitativeapproaches and the whole evaluation procedures are as follows: it begins with a preliminaryevaluation concerning the detailed language items and the task contents in the coursebook.Then there comes an in-use evaluation directed against the above two aspects, taking student’sand teacher’s views into consideration. In the present research, SPSS16.0is used to calculateand analyze the quantitative data. The major findings of this thesis are clarified below:Firstly, the language items and task types in IEC generally meet the requirementsspecified by the new National Syllabus and reach the instructional objectives for Englishmajors to cultivate students’ abilities comprehensively and IEC users express basicsatisfaction with its presentation.Secondly, the language items and task design are intended to cultivate in students acomprehensive ability in the five language skills, build a solid language base and developstudents’ ability to use the language.Thirdly, the tasks designed in IEC series do bear much pedagogical values but fail toplay a major role in fostering communicative language use and in adequately engagingstudents’ interest.Fourthly, for one thing, the major strengths of language items and task design in IEC arelisted below:(1) Training in developing comprehensive language skills.(2) Focusing onlearning value in the task design.(3) Adequate amount of input and output. For another, themajor weaknesses of language items and task design in IEC are concluded as follows:(1) Thecompilation and application of certain language items and task types are not so satisfactory. First, most students reflect that the presentation of grammatical items is lack of completenessand the number as well as the difficulty level of grammar cannot fully meet their needs. Thecontent of listening materials is monotonous and outdated. Second, some task types,especially phonetics, oral activities, writing exercises, and listening exercises are oftenneglected in classroom teaching and not made full use of.(2) Regarding to the teaching oftasks, traditional teaching method is still in its dominant way.(3) A contradiction betweenlearners’ interest and the task design.(4) Lack of communicative principle in task design.Based on the above findings, some theoretical and practical implications are elaborated.Meanwhile some limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are proposed.