An Analysis Of New Century College English Course-books From Communicative Competence Perspective

Course-book analysis and evaluation is to analyze the course-book with reference tocertain criteria by certain methods. Evaluators vary their criteria and methods in course-bookanalysis from diverse perspectives for different purposes. Although purposes are diverse, thecourse-book analysis and evaluation has its own significance that nobody can deny. Throughthe systematic analysis and evaluation, the strong points and more importantly the weakpoints of the under-evaluation course-book can be observed. It helps the teacher on one handto make full use of the strong points of the course-book, and on the other hand to make someadjustments and supplement to the weak points during their teaching process.Hymes separated language knowledge from actual use and came up with communicativecompetence in comparison with linguistic competence. Traditional ELT focuses on thelinguistic form of language itself or we called language knowledge in order to cultivatelearners’ linguistic competence. Later educators gradually realized that students should notonly learn language knowledge or skills, but more importantly should learn how to uselanguage appropriately in real communications. These competences required are so calledcommunicative competence. This thesis analyzes and evaluates The New Century CollegeEnglish Course-book: Zooming in: An integrated English Course (for non English majors)from the perspective of communicative competence.At the beginning of the thesis, some theories in terms of communicative competence arepresented. Then, the author combines these theories with the components of college Englishcourse-books to conclude the specific working criteria and methods as well as its checklist forthis dissertation. Referring to the question-formed checklist, the core part of the thesis beginsto do the external and internal analysis of the course-books for the purpose to check whetherthe course-books are indeed to cultivate students’ communicative competence in5skillsrespectively, which is specified in College English Curriculum Requirements..Through the analysis, the author concluded the strong points and weak points of thecourse-books from the communicative perspective. The strong points are that thecourse-books have indeed paid attention to some communicative factors, such as thecourse-books provide contexts for vocabulary learning; almost all texts are directly selected orextracted from articles written by L1authors and from L1countries. The weak points are that only a few factors are fully taken considered or referred; most of other referred factors are notdealt with to a satisfactory extent or far from enough; some communicative factors are evennot taken into consideration at all, such as the discourse rules and the language functions.For the strong points, teachers can make full use of them in their teaching process; forthe weak points, teachers may find some supplementary materials to supply relevant languagepoints and the compiler may think over these weaknesses for further course-books design ormodification. Only we continuously combine the presentation of the communicative factors inthe course-books with the teaching process of teachers, can college students’ communicativecompetence reach a higher level step by step.