A Comparative Study On Text Complexity Of The Same Thematic Texts In Different Versions Of New Senior High School English Textbooks

The publication of new versions of textbooks necessitates the study for text evaluation.To scientifically employ textbooks in teaching,it is of practical significance to inspect the text complexity of textbooks.The present study,on the basis of Input Hypothesis and Zone of Proximal Development,works with the idea that text complexity makes a difference in students’ comprehension and language development.The study is intended to answer the general research question: In the same thematic clusters,are there any significant differences between the two versions of the textbooks,People’s Education Press(PEP)and Beijing Normal University Press(BNUP),concerning the text complexity in listening,reading,and writing sections? The present study constructs a scheme and builds a corpus for comparison on the basis of the texts from Book1 to Book 3 of the two versions.Guided by General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2017),PEP and BNUP are two widely used versions of textbooks for senior high school English teaching.Based on the scheme,textbooks are divided and texts are processed through the software Eng-Editor to evaluate and compare different sections and thematic clusters from the dimensions of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity and discourse complexity.Based on the results,the study draws the conclusions.(1)Except for the reading section in ―life and learning‖ and listening section in ―science and technology‖,no significant differences are found among other texts from PEP and BNUP.(2)As for the listening section,in terms of the same thematic cluster,BNUP is more complex than PEP in lexical complexity,syntactic complexity and discourse complexity.(3)As for the reading section,in terms of thematic clusters ―life and learning‖ ―literature,art,and sports‖ and ―science and technology‖,BNUP is more intricate than PEP in all dimensions.In terms of other thematic clusters,PEP and BNUP work with higher complexity in different dimensions.(4)As for the writing section,in terms of ―life and learning‖ and―disaster prevention‖,PEP is more intricate than BNUP in all dimensions,but in terms of―environmental protection‖,BNUP shows higher complexity in all dimensions.In terms of other thematic clusters,both of them hold higher complexity in diverse dimensions.