| As a major component in the implementation of an English course, a 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 coursebooks both in and out of the classroom. With the reform of college English teaching, a variety of coursebooks in line with the National College English Syllabus (1999) have been compiled and published for non-English major students at present in China. The coursebook used as an example for the evaluation is College English (New) (henceforth CEN) which is just one of these popular coursebooks and has been adopted in many colleges and universities since its first edition (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 14.0.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 that includes two processes, preliminary evaluation (the analysis of the material as it is) and in-use evaluation (taking students and teachers' views 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 the variety of text. Subsequently she uses Littlejohn's (1998) Task Analysis Sheet and two specified questions to evaluate the task types designed in CEN. 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 Xuzhou Institute of Technology to investigate their beliefs concerning the presentation and the task types of CEN. 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 CEN are specified respectively.Based on the evaluation, College English (New) series aims to create a learner-centered and teacher-guided model of teaching and to develop students' abilities 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 college 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 CEN 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 need 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, to equip English teachers with material evaluation model, and to shed light on the change of teaching/learning model in ELT (English language teaching) classroom.
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