Coursebook Evaluation On New Horizon College English

As a major component in the implementation of an English course, coursebook is best seen as an essential factor contributing to the accomplishment of teaching content and the achievement of teaching objectives. Its significance is self-evidently justified and cannot be neglected particularly for Chinese college students who still greatly rely on coursebook both in and out of the classroom. With the reform of college English teaching, a variety of coursebooks are compiled and published in the market which are claimed to be in line with the National College English Syllabus (1999). As one of them, New Horizon College English (henceforth NHCE) has been popularly adopted in plenty of colleges and universities since its first publication (2001). The thesis attempts to conduct a systematic and comprehensive analysis and evaluation of this series of college English coursebook based on the concerned evaluation theories and statistic software of SPSS 12.0.The author initially reviews some relevant theoretical principles, linguistic theories, language learning theories and syllabus theories for material evaluation and development respectively. Obtaining much inspiration from ELT (English language teaching) material evaluation theories, the author sets up a working model for the present evaluation which precedes two processes, preliminary evaluation (the analysis of the material as it is) and in-use evaluation (taking student and teacher's view into consideration).In the preliminary evaluation the author analyzes the coursebook from the aspects of its package, compiler's claims, and item analysis of vocabulary, grammar, skills, social-cultural content, language input, and variety of texts and subsequently evaluated the task types designed in NHCE by using Littlejohn's (1998) Task Analysis Sheet and some specified questions. In order to make the author's judgment in the preliminary evaluation less biased, an in-use evaluation is conducted by administering questionnaires and interviews to sophomore students of three different majors at Wuhan University of Technology to investigate their beliefs concerning the presentation of NHCE and the task types in NHCE. The results of data analysis generally correspond with the author's judgment in the preliminary evaluation.Accordingly the strengths and weaknesses of the series of NHCE are specified respectively.Based on the evaluation, New Horizon College English series is intended to create a learner-centered and theme-based model of teaching, and to lay a solid foundation in English and to develop students' ability to use the language. To some extent it is justified that the series generally meets the requirements proposed by the currently designed syllabus to develop students' capabilities comprehensively and its users are basically satisfied with its large amount of input. The tasks designed in it are approved to bear pedagogical values to deepen the understanding of the texts and consolidate the knowledge learned. However, the series of NHCE is a bit far from perfect due to the deficiencies of relatively-biased cultural orientation, lack of cooperative learning model, and lack of variety and communicative principle in task design, which are needed to be taken into consideration in material adaptation.The significance of the thesis is to construct a new working model under which the evaluation of one popularly-used college English coursebook is undertaken with a view to draw attention to the language materials evaluation work, equip English teachers with material evaluation model, and to shed light on the change of teaching/learning model in ELT classroom.