Evaluation On Nautical English Reading Textbooks Based On Cunningworth's System

For a long period of time, there has been no unified evaluation system on nautical English textbooks, which leaves the teachers in great blindness and subjectivity when selecting textbooks and is likely to cause some differences in teaching effects and a great deviation from the syllabus.It is agreed that in addition of the combination of "subject" and "linguistics", the improvement of nautical English should lay particular emphasis on "language", especially the relevant requests on Subject-Based English (SBE) from College English Syllabus.According to College English Syllabus 2004, the thesis firstly defines some specific quantitative criteria on the main body of textbooks— "text" from a linguistic point of view, including text length (1000 to 3000 words), sentence length (more or less the same with that of CET 6), occurrence of complex sentences (ditto), occurrence of important nautical words and abbreviations (1000 to 1500 words). Then two nautical English reading textbooks respectively from Dalian Maritime University (Model Book 1) and Shanghai Maritime University (Model Book 2) are taken for example to match these criteria up with and the results are listed as follows:(1) The length of almost each text in Model Book 2 is much longer than the criterion, while the majority in Model Book 1 lies within the range;(2) The sentence length in either Model Book 1 or Model Book 2 is longer than that in CET 6 and the discrepancy is significant;(3) The occurrence of complex sentences in Model Book 2 is more than that of Model Book 1 and CET 6, while there is no significant different between CET 6 and Model Book 1;(4) There is no significant difference in the use of passive sentences among Model Book 1, Model Book 2 and CET 6;(5) The occurrence of important nautical words and abbreviations in neither of the two textbooks could meet the requirement in the syllabus, and only a small number of them are concluded with more than 5 times;In addition, Flesh Formula is applied in the thesis to compute the readability of thetexts in both model books, and the results are compared with the readability of CET 6. The statistics show that:(6) Model Book 2 is a bit easier to read than CET 6, and Model Book 1 is the most difficult of the three.At last, the thesis advocates establishing an independent unified evaluation system on nautical English textbooks. It is hoped that the criteria and operations in the thesis could contribute to the selection and adoption of nautical English textbooks.