A Research On Poetry Materials In Senior English For China

With the development of the world wild education reform, higher goals are set up for foreign language teaching in the new era. In response to the tendency, the latest Curriculum Criteria of Secondary Education states not only pragmatic goals in language knowledge and competence but also humanistic goals in cultivating learning attitude, strategies and enhancing cultural consciousness. It is a great breakthrough in the history of English teaching that humanistic goals are valued, for it shows that our education regards students as human beings with feelings, not simply containers of knowledge, and, therefore, attaches great importance to the cultivation of the students' humanistic quality.English teaching in our country has been known for its low efficiency, partly because of the problems in teaching material selection. Affected too much by the Communicative Teaching Approach, the textbook being used in most senior schools consists of more spoken /practical materials than written/literary materials, leading to unsatisfactory consequences. So the present thesis centers on why and how English poems should be added to the current teaching materials in the hope of making some practical suggestions to perfect the textbook.The main part of the thesis comprises four chapters. The first introduces the current teaching materials in Senior English for China. The second turns to Applied Language Theory and Humanistic tradition in education to seek theoretical backup. The third makes a comparison between the number of poems in English textbooks home and abroad, concluding that more poems should be brought into the English teaching classroom in China. In the light of the above analysis, the last chapter proposes a plan in which poems can be added to the teaching materials in SEFC, based on Book 1, SEFC.