Comparison Of Shanghai English Textbook And Oxford English Textbook For Senior High School

Textbooks, as students' learning resources and learning tools, are foundation to attain teaching objectives. With the reform in curriculum putting into practice, the Educational Authorities will gradually carry out the policy to diversify versions in textbooks under the guidance of national Curriculum Standards, which will improve the adaptation of textbooks to specific area, school and students. Therefore, a new problem has arisen among teachers, that is, Facing the diversification in textbooks, what should teachers do to evaluate the quality of textbooks, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of textbooks and then make a sensible decision? This has become a vital problem for teachers to be solved.Nowadays most teachers trend to use textbooks to teach, which means they only pass on the knowledge contained in textbooks and see it as final teaching objectives. Action research for language teachers require teachers to know how to analyze and evaluate the curriculum, and then take an active and creative attitude to develop textbooks, that is so say, textbooks should serve teaching, not teaching is controlled by textbooks.In my final paper, I choose two textbooks from three ones as representatives which are being used in senior high schools in Shanghai. They are <>, published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, <> co-published by Shanghai Education Press & Oxford University Press, focusing on the contents of these two textbooks in Senior 1 &2. I will make the comparison from the general-and-specific aspects of textbooks.From the general-aspect, I'll compare three sides in developing textbooks, which are development principles, development systems and design, to outline the whole textbooks. With the comparison on them, we get to know that two textbooks have reflected advanced philosophy of the day in language, language learning and curriculum.On the other hand, from the specific-aspect, language knowledge, language skills and materials should be compared, including teachers' manual. By means of comparison, we can also perceive some other function of textbooks beyond developing students' intelligence, which is cross-disciplinary knowledge, ethical values and culture, and this indicates that the goal of curriculum education has moved on to develop a full man.Finally, from the point of textbooks' function, I'll discuss the trend to developtextbooks, and meanwhile from the point of communication in foreign language classrooms, I'll explore the best interrelation between teachers, students and textbooks.This paper is aimed to make a reasonable comparison on two textbooks by associating what happened in actual teaching situation with some information collected from textbooks themselves, which I hope can help teachers to understand textbooks better and can be the reference for teaching and compiling textbooks in the future.