Study Of English Majors’ Intensive Reading Textbooks By Difficulty And Gradient

The present study is intended to evaluate a set of textbooks employed Englishmajors in China, namely, Contemporary College English. Since intensive readingenjoys a vital role in the whole courses of English majors, textbooks designed forintensive reading textbook has attached great importance. Nevertheless, somematerials in intensive reading textbooks are randomly selected and depart fromteaching syllabus and second language learning regulations. It is worth evaluating aninfluential textbook for English majors. There are several approaches to do theevaluation. One is to use vocabulary to assess a text book because vocabulary hasmuch to do with reading comprehension. The thesis sets up to conduct an empiricalresearch with the aid of RANGE program, which is software of vocabulary statistics.The author has selected the textbook Contemporary College English from book1to book4published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, as source oftexts for the research.Based on the results and discussion demonstrated in the experiment, the studyreveals three key points. First of all, even if most of passages in the4textbooks are inline with step-by-step learning regulation, there indeed appears to be some mismatchor disorder in materials compilation, particularly in Book3. Second, in evaluation ofthe mentioned materials, it is worth mentioning that further consideration must begiven to text selection upon which language teachers can gauge teaching task andestablish teaching plan. Finally, and perhaps most critical to the current study, fewstudies have concentrated on intensive reading textbooks from the perspective ofdifficulty index and gradient due to the lack of empirical evidence, but still have away to go due to devoid of syntax or pragmatic analysis in this study.