A Study Of NSE Coursebook In Use For Junior High School Students

As the curriculum reform of elementary education comes into practice, the situation of using only one kind of teaching materials has been changed. Many new textbooks are published. New Standard English (NSE) coursebook is compiled by the cooperation of Foreign Language Teaching And Research and Macmillan Ltd, and published by Foreign Language Teaching And Research Press. NSE coursebook for junior high school students is a part of the components of the series NSE coursebooks.NSE coursebook for junior high school students has been used since 2003 in Guilin. What are the results of NSE coursebook in use? How do the users evaluate NSE coursebook? And are there any other factors that affect the results of the new coursebook? In order to find out the answers to these questions, it takes the author of this paper more than one year to do the research on the users of the NSE coursebook and NSE coursebook itself. The author designs questionnaires, interviews and observes the real classroom teaching activities; as a result of the study, the author herself finds out not only the users'positive and negative reflections on the NSE coursebook but also some problems existing in the process of using the coursebook.NSE coursebook can basically meet the learners'needs. NSE coursebook has its advantages as well as its deficiencies. According to most of the English teachers and the language learners interviewed, the principal advantages of NSE coursebook material can be summed up as below:"Being up to date","Laying stress on language in use"and"Concerning about the learners"and so on. On the other hand, being a new set of textbooks, NSE coursebook inevitably has some disadvantages. For instance, there are quite a few misprints or errors in the textbooks; the grammar compiled in NSE is messy; preliminary experiments related to the books are lacking. Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) can not play a dominant role in classroom teaching and learning; due to lack of basic training, teachers feel hard to adapt to using the coursebooks of their own will, so many English teachers hope that their textbooks can be used more conveniently.At the same time, from the interview, the author herself finds out some problems, which exist in middle school English teaching. Firstly, among the teachers interviewed, there are only about half of them would like to carry out classroom teaching reform. Secondly, quite a few teachers know well ECS, which works as instructions for English teaching and learning. Thirdly, the English teachers'qualifications need to be improved, and the results of the teachers'training are unsatisfactory. Fourthly, the evaluation of English teaching is lagging behind the curriculum reform, which restricts the development of English teaching.At the end of the paper, the author tries to give some advices for improving the role of the appointed coursebook.