An Evaluation Of New Horizon College English Based On College English Curriculum Requirements

Materials Development is a new branch of Applied Linguistics. New Horizon College English is a set of newly published, widely used College English textbooks. It was widely introduced and reviewed. However, a large proportion of the reviews are similar to what is included in the textbooks themselves.This paper investigates this set of widely used College English textbooks with a view to examining how well the textbook in question gears with College English Curriculum Requirements. A corpus of all the texts included in New Horizon College English was built to provide the raw data for statistical analysis. Questionnaire, together with follow-up interviews were also used to collect data. SPSS, together with Excel, and FoxPro programming were used for quantitative data analysis. Qualitative data of interview were analyzed by summarizing and synthesizing. The textbooks were studied from various perspectives, namely, design and organization, language content, skills, topics, methodology and Teacher's book.The research question of the study is how well the textbook New Horizon College English corresponds with College English Curriculum Requirements. Results indicate that, NHCE (2003) basically meet the requirements stipulated in CECR (2004) as a College English textbook. The language content and topics in the textbooks receives compliment;there are some discouraging aspects in terms of design and organization, skills and methodology;Teacher's book has much to improve. Therefore, it is suggested that more evaluation should be performed on textbooks to promote the development of Materials Development.