An Evaluation Of College Experiencing English On The Basis Of The Curriculum Requirements And Its Practical Use

Coursebooks have a profound effect on both teaching and learning. There are various college English coursebooks in the market, so it is a primary task to choose a proper one. College Experiencing English (CEE) is a new set of coursebooks widely used in universities. Many researchers have introduced and evaluated it; however, most of the introductions and evaluations are similar to those prefaced to the coursebooks. This paper tries to investigate CEE in a deep and empirical way, aiming to find out how well CEE conforms with College English Curriculum Requirements (CECR).Through interview, questionnaire and the statistics of raw data from CEE texts, this paper combines both qualitative and quantitative analyses to evaluate the coursebooks from such aspects as aims and approaches, design and organization, language content, skill training, teaching methodology and Teacher's Book.On the whole, CEE proves to be in conformity with the CECR. Specifically, the results of the study reveal that (1) CEE embodies the latest notion of coursebook development—Cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics; (2) as to design and organization, there exist some obvious defects in the reappearance of new words and the frequency ratio of words listed in CECR; (3) in terms of language content, it is warmly welcomed by its users; (4) listening materials need adapting to an appropriate difficulty level; (5) CEE focuses on individualized instruction and autonomous learning, but the computer-assisted and network-based teaching and learning models are not fully used; (6) Teacher's Book is expected to provide more guidance for classroom instruction. Based on these findings, the paper offers some practical suggestions for further research on coursebook development and for the improvement of CEE coursebooks.