A Comparative Study On Textbook Evaluation Between New Horizon College English And New Standard College English

Textbooks play an essential role in stabilizing teaching order, ensuring quality of teaching, innovating teaching content, and directing teaching reform in college English education. However, faced with a wide variety of college English textbooks, how to evaluate their merits and demerits with a scientific method has become a urgent issue. Currently, empirical textbook evaluation research is very limited, and the applied evaluating methods are mostly quoted directly some foreign experts with strong subjectivity. Hence, based on domestic and oversea evaluation theories, this paper is going to make an in-depth comparative study on students' books between New Horizon College English (NHCE) and New Standard English (NSCE) used in Xi'an Technological University (XATU) in order to offer some advice for students and teachers to make a reasonable and effective use and selection of textbooks, and some new ideas for the textbook evaluation research.According to the classification theory of textbook evaluation from Tomlinson, and Cunningsworth's, Grant's, and Zhou Xuelin's evaluation checklists, this study first designs a new evaluation model of double-layer structure, then carries out the research in three steps. The first step is the internal evaluation of the two textbooks, including the editing ideology, content, new words, texts, and exercises of comparative analysis. Additionally, the results of average length of texts, the volume and repetition ratio of new words are obtained through the establishment of the related databases and the use of relevant software. The second step, the external evaluation, carries out the surveys on students', teachers' and editors' satisfaction towards all aspects of two textbooks in forms of questionnaires and interviews, then collects and analyzes the statistics. The final step conducts an overall comparison of both textbooks based on the data obtained from two prior steps according to the College English Curriculum Requirements (the CECR) and the Syllables of College English Test (Band 4) and check which book is better than the other.The internal evaluation shows that the volume of content, the volume and repetition ratio of new words, and the average length of texts are similar and conform to the CECR. However, NSCE has a more forward-looking editing ideology, more diverse types of content, more appropriate new word proportion, more genres of texts, more various topics, and larger volumes and more sophisticated forms of exercises than those of NHCE.In the external evaluation, statistics of the questionnaires show NHCE and NSCE have great differences in the following aspects:for the ways of learning new words,15% of the students and 58% of teachers are satisfied with the NHCE, while 55% of the students and 79% of the teachers are satisfied with NSCE; for the topics reflecting the cultural diversity,37% of students and 35% of the teachers are satisfied with NHCE, while 66% of students and 71% of the teachers are satisfied with NSCE; for the overall design of content,33% of the students and 45% of teachers satisfied with NHCE, while 48% of the students and 82% of teachers are satisfied with the NSCE; for the total volume of exercise,31% of students and 19% of teachers show satisfactory toward NHCE, while 50% of students and 54% of the teachers are satisfied with the NSCE. In addition, for the editing ideology, the total volume of new words, design of the exercises and other aspects, the students' and teachers' satisfactory ratios of NSCE are also slightly higher than those of NHCE. Furthermore, the students, teachers and editors in the interviews also prefer NSCE. Therefore, the external evaluation proves that NSCE is better than NHCE.In short, both internal and external evaluation draw the same conclusion:NSCE accords to the CECR more closely than NHCE on the editing ideology, and owns more artistic appearance, lager varieties of content design, more flexible and practical vocabulary learning method, richer types of topics, and more adequate and innovative kinds of exercises, which meet the needs of teachers and students in teaching and learning.