A Comparative Study Between The Textbooks Of Go For It! And JEFC

In recent years, the role of textbooks in the middle school has been more and more important. Nowadays, it is generally accepted that the role of the textbook is to be at the service of teachers and learners but not to be their master. Teachers should use the teaching materials flexibly instead of repeating what the book says. This requests better quality of textbooks and also asks for teachers' good use of textbooks.In the modern teaching theory, English teaching materials is a broad sense, that is, all of the English language teaching materials; the narrow sense refers to the textbook in the traditional sense. In this paper, I will mainly discuss the textbooks as teaching materials in English. With the development and changes in educational thinking, the modern concept is that teaching materials should "serve as the medium of instruction" rather than as "control" and "norm" in teaching, and that teaching materials are a tool provided for language learning in line with the laws of foreign language learning.Through the evaluation of many English theoretical analyses, combined with their own teaching practice, I believe that the evaluation of teaching materials can generally be carried out from the following aspects: (1) the teaching materials to meet the learning needs of learners; (2) the teaching materials to meet the teachers'teaching needs; (3) and the teaching materials to meet the needs of the curriculum and examinationSince 1949, the compiling of English materials has gone through a curved path of progress. Nowadays, the textbook for learners in many junior high schools is Go for it. We have once used JEFC. Go for it features a"building blocks"approach and task-based approach to language learning within a framework of learner-centre themes. JEFC adopts structural and functional syllabus. Teachers have different opinions when they are using the two of them. But the comparative research of these two textbooks is sparse and needs to be developed. To this end, comparing the two sets of teaching materials systematically is helpful to our using Go for it more effectively. So it can help teachers use the teaching materials well and offer authors of the textbook some advice on how to improve it as well.There are five chapters in this thesis:The first chapter introduces the development of English language teaching materials in junior middle schools and application requirements.The second chapter summarizes the research of the textbooks and outlines the basic principle of the textbooks, and an introduction of the recent research on the editing and the evaluation of the textbooks in the world.The third chapter introduces the purposes, methods and objects of the study.The fourth chapter evaluates the two textbooks: first, an overall introduction on the two sets of teaching materials, and then comparison of the two in terms of topics, language contents, skills concerned, and so on. The language contents contain the comparison of grammar and vocabulary. And the language skills include the comparison of listening, speaking, reading and writing.Chapter five describes the significance and enlightenment of this study, and provides some suggestion for teachers.I hope this thesis can provide some advice for the editing and teaching of the textbook. I also hope to explore the approach of textbook using to improve English language teaching.