Assessing And Designing Reading Comprehension Activities In Textbooks

When it comes to activities and materials for language teaching and learning, textbooks have always been regarded as the most useful resource for students. Language practice, however, is essential to successful language learning. According to Ur (2000:19), "practice can be roughly defined as the rehearsal of certain behaviors with the objective of consolidating learning and improving performance." Language knowledge is normally brought about through consolidation of learning through practice. So assessing and designing activities should be placed much importance in textbooks evaluation.In many reading instruction programs, a great amount of emphasis and time may be placed on testing reading comprehension than on teaching readers how to comprehend. It is obvious that reading activities aiming at testing reading comprehension do not facilitate the reading process and improve students' reading competence.The main purpose of this study was to assess and design reading activities in textbooks by analyzing the content of reading skills and knowledge and the presentation of techniques for reading activities in textbooks on the basis of textbooks evaluation and the nature of reading. The research questions explored in the study are two:1. Are the reading knowledge and skills concentrating on the process of reading covered in the content of reading activities in the textbook?2. Does the presentation of reading activities fulfill the principles of textbooks design and facilitate students' reading comprehension?The subjects were three sets of reading textbooks, which were most commonly used by the colleges and universities in Wuhan for non-English-major undergraduates. The instrument for the study was a self-developed evaluation checklist based on the principles of textbooks design and theories as to the nature of reading and reading strategies to facilitate reading, which contains two parts, the content of the activities and the presentation techniques. Hopefully, the findings of the study can provide some reference for the writing and assessing of reading activities in textbooks.The main findings of this study are summarized as following:1. Generally speaking, nearly all the reading knowledge and skills are covered in the textbooks but the recognition and interpretation of cohesive devices has an irregulartreatment. And activities of using reference skills and free practices are not contained in the textbooks evaluated.2. The presentation of the reading activities basically caters for the principles of textbooks design.3. While the design of activities in textbooks is approved, the types of activities for some reading skills are monotonous. For example, the types of activities for training the skill of making inference or the writer's attitude are only limited to answering the questions.4. Application questions, which asked to use the information in a text to solve the problem, are not attached much importance in the reading activities.5. Students are not provided with visual information and asked to re-express it in word though they are asked to re-express the linguistic information by means of visual structures in textbooks.In the last part of the thesis, suggestions for activities design incorporate the supplemented types of activities to the original ones and newly designed types of activities which can not be found in the textbooks.