Business English Reading Textbooks Evaluation Based On Learners’Needs

Owing to the importance of textbooks in promoting knowledge construction,studies on textbook evaluation are conducted by various scholars.However,few of these studies dig into the suitability of Business English textbooks,and the existing frameworks for textbooks’suitability assessment are created based on researchers’personal experiences.How to select the textbook with appropriate difficulty degree is still a tough thing for both instructors and leaners.This study aims to find an effective method to evaluate Business English textbooks for textbook selection or adaptation.It does a case study on the evaluation of Business English:A Reading Course(2^nd Edition)—a widely adopted series of reading textbooks by colleges in China.In this case,the series of textbooks are used by students from College of Continuing Education and Open College of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.There are three questions put forward at the beginning of the study:1)What are the expectations of learners to the textbooks in this study?2)To what degree do the Business English reading textbooks fulfill those expectations?3)How can the Business English reading textbooks serve those learners better according to research results?Based on theories of Needs Analysis,a method combining qualitative research approach and textbook evaluation is adopted for the present research to develop an overall table for the evaluation of Business English reading textbooks’suitability.According to the evaluation table,questionnaire is designed and surveys are conducted among the target learners,from which the expectations of the Business English reading textbook are derived as the evaluation criteria.So far,the first question can be answered.Then,objective analysis is conducted with the help of linguistic analytical tools,from which the results got are compared to the criteria obtained from questionnaire surveys.To what degree does the textbooks reach learners’expectations and whether they are suitable for those learners thus can be seen.The evaluation of Business English reading textbook from the perspective of vocabulary,text,grammar,and pedagogical activities reveals that the low frequency of new words or expressions,the diversity of words,the complexity of syntax,and the low readability,the lack of text cohesion,the confusing organization of topics and the complicated cognitive process of exercises and tasks,make the textbook content difficult for learners in this case.It is hard to fulfill all the needs within a textbook,but instructors can use the textbooks flexibly to meet most learners’demands,by means of scheduling the course flexibly,or selecting supplementary materials or substituted texts and exercises to underpin the teaching based on classroom practices.Theoretically,the present study has proposed a method to the evaluation of textbook’s suitability by refining an analytical framework and developing its own evaluation table based on theories of learners’needs and research on textbook assessment.This method takes learners’demands and second language learning process into consideration.However,there is still a way to go,due to the lack of explicit grading on suitability and the insufficiency of analysis in cultural,genre,and reading strategy aspects.