A Comparative Evaluation Of Task Design In Two Sets Of College English Textbooks

As a major component in the implementation of an English course, textbook 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 textbook both in and out of the classroom. With the reform of college English teaching, a variety of textbooks are compiled and published in the market which are claimed to be in line with the National College English Syllabus (1999). Among them, College English (new), published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press in 2001 and Experiencing English, issued by High Education Press in 2003 have been adopted in Dalian University of Technology (DUT). This thesis aims to conduct preliminary and in-use evaluation of these two sets of textbooks from the angle of task design.To facilitate the evaluation process, Littlejohn's definition of 'task', which has been broadened to incorporate both communicative tasks and traditional exercises, is adopted in this thesis. The evaluation adopts a procedure of three phases: 1) in the preliminary evaluation stage, the author began the evaluation by listing the task types in these books. After that, the author proceeded to analyze the task types in detail by using Littlejohn's Task Analysis Sheet and a pre-specified checklist.2) in order to make the judgment in the preliminary evaluation less biased, an in-use evaluation was conducted. Three questionnaires were administered to the students and the teachers in DUT, the data analyzed by software SPSS.3) put forward suggestions for the possible adaptations and teaching application derived from the findings of the survey. Findings show that the tasks designed in both textbooks can meet the students' communicative requirement to some extent, but in certain aspect they all have merits and demerits.The information generated from this study could be very beneficial, as such an evaluation can help current users of the two textbooks adapt them more effectively and the evaluation criteria developed from this study could provide a useful guide for evaluators on how to carry out their own evaluation.