The Effectiveness Of Reading Coursebooks On The Development Of Students' Reading Skill

A coursebook is a major component in the implementation of an English course. It can influence many aspects of teaching and learning. To select suitable coursebooks can contribute greatly to the accomplishment of teaching content and the achievement of teaching objectives. This study has conducted a post-use evaluation of Reading and Writing Coursebook of New Horizon College English and the revised edition of Intensive Reading of College English, two series of English coursebooks used by non-English major in Guizhou University, with the dominant aim of examining the reading materials in this two coursebooks and evaluating how the reading materials develop students' reading skills. According to the 1999 College English Syllabus, students' reading ability is extremely emphasized in College English instruction. It is meaningful for teachers' instruction to evaluate how well this two set of widely-used English coursebook correspond with the requirement of developing students' high ability in readingOur study was conducted in the form of systematic evaluation. Both an internal evaluation and an external evaluation were adopted to evaluate coursebooks themselves. As for an internal evaluation, coursebooks were evaluated from the aspects of topic and subject content, authentic and native language material, exercise design and organization of coursebooks. When dealing with external evaluation, we collected views from teachers and students by questionnaires and interviews. The data of the thesis were collected from questionnaires and interviews. This research selected both the qualitative approach and quantitative approach according to the character of the data. Questionnaires data were analyzed by computer software such as SPSS. The data collected from the interview were analyzed qualitatively by observing, induction and description.The results of the research indicate that Reading and Writing Coursebook of New Horizon is the textbook that basically meet students' need to develop reading ability in English learning. The difficulty and topics of reading materials is well accepted by both teachers and students. The findings of College English are as follows: Generally speaking, the reading materials in Intensive Reading can meet the needs of students laying language basis. But the reading materials are aging, some improvement needed to be conducted. Finally, the researcher states the limitations of this study and gives suggestions for future study.