A Contrastive Study Of Syllabus Design Of 3 College English Coursebooks In 21～(st) Century At GXU

Syllabus design is a very important part in coursebooks writing and evaluation. This thesis aims to help teachers have a good command of procedures and principles of syllabus design, so that they can use scientific theories and methods to choose, evaluate and write teaching materials. First of all, the thesis introduces the definition, types, shapes and principles of syllabus design, then it describes the best approaches of evaluation—combination of internal and external evaluation, i.e. the integration of qualitative and quantitative study. Then, a contrastive survey has been conducted to evaluate the consistency between syllabus design and its real effect. The subjects involved in the study were 3 couresebooks, 208 second-year students and 4 English teachers at GXU. Questionnaires and interviews were used to evaluate from the interior and exterior, qualitative and quantitative aspects. The findings are the following: Generally speaking, the three coursebooks published in the 21st century have good syllabus design. But some drawbacks of them were also revealed: specific objectives are missing in the syllabus design and table of contents are not well designed. Based on the objectives in the new College English Curriculum Requirements, some suggestions on teaching reform have been put forward.