The Comparative Research On The English Teaching Materials In The Junior High School

In the educational history, the development of education and curriculum always goes forward with the development of teaching materials. So, it's of great theoretical and practical significance for the on-going reform of curriculum and teaching materials to research into teaching materials from the standing point of history, and to probe into both their characteristics and trend in the course of historical evolution. In view of the above-mentioned facts, guided by the basic principles of pedagogic theory, the article combines with the achievements in English pedagogic theory, uses many scientific research methodologies such as documental method, comparative method and investigating method, etc., and researches into the historical development and trend of junior high school English teaching materials published after Liberation so as to inquire into the past, the present and the future of the elementary education from indirect resources. Firstly, the article discusses the function of teaching materials in teaching activities and puts forward the great significance of studying into the evolution of teaching materials; it introduces that the evolution of English teaching materials in the junior high school has gone through the phases of exploration, establishment, stagnation, recovery and development since 1949, revealing the contradictory relationship between the evolution of teaching materials and the social reform. Secondly, on the basis of inquiring into the evolution of English syllabuses in the junior high school and analyzing the change of the guiding ideology of compiling the teaching materials, the article takes different Grade-One English teaching materials published by People's Education Press since 1963 as research objects and compares their contents and structures from the angles of knowledge, psychology, morality and culture, attempting to make a close analysis of their characteristics. By means of the theoretical analysis of the teaching materials and the practical investigation into them, the article probes into the characteristics of the English experimental teaching materials published in 2003. Moreover, it makes some suggestions about the use of the new experimental teaching materials. Finally, resting on the systematic comparison of the different English teaching materials, the article advances several perceptions of the reform of English teaching materials in the junior high school, including the diversified development of compiling teaching materials, the man-based and quality-orientated development of the compiling ideology, the integrated, modernized and elastic development of the content of teaching materials, the heuristic and cooperative tendency of the teaching and studying method and the interactive tendency of the classroom instruction pattern.