A Coursebook Evaluation Of New Standard English In Use (for China's Junior Middle School)

In June 2001, the Ministry of Education formally issued the" Symposium on Curriculum Reform of School Education(trial edition)"and decided to promote the curriculum reform of school education to meet the requirements of the quality education. Guided by the New National English curriculum, more and more new English coursebooks have made their way to the market. The rigid framework of "one syllabus, one coursebook" is broken. Teachers and students need to be able to make appropriate choices when selecting coursebooks and supporting materials.In the past, people preferred to choose coursebooks depending on subjective impression. Which is not a scientific and systematic way of evaluating coursebooks. Nowadays, people tend to evaluate the coursebook more scientifically and systematically.Faced with the rich variety of coursebooks available on the market, more and more educational practitioners start to concern about whether these new English coursebooks can meet the needs of the curriculum reform in English teaching and learning. As the New Standard English is used in Huhhot, the author makes a survey of this major English coursebook NSE in order to find out the merits and demerits of the coursebook in use. It takes the author of this paper more than one year to do the research among the users(mainly the teachers) of the NSE coursebook. The author designs some questionnaires based on Coursebook Evaluation survey tables by Grant(1987). About forty teachers are interviewed and thirty-eight papers are collected. As a result of the study, the author 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. The data collected shows that NSE coursebook can basically meet the learners' needs in that "being up to date", "laying stress on language in use" " concerning about the learners" and helping in improving learners' writing ability and so on. On the other hand, being a new set of textbooks, NSE coursebook inevitably has some weaknesses. For instance, the grammar compiled in NSE is messy; preliminary experiments related to the books are lacking. Due to lack of basic training, teachers feel some difficulty in using the coursebooks of their own . Through the research, the author finds some problems which exist in the current middle school English teaching.This thesis consists of five parts: Chapter One briefly describes the current curriculum reform in basic education and the significance of the present study. Chapter Two gives an overview of major theories and research work in the coursebook evaluation Chapter Three gives a description of the research methology. Chapter Four analyzes the data that have been collected and a detailed evaluation of NSE coursebook is made. Chapter Five deals with a discussion of the findings of the research. makes a conclusion of the whole thesis and puts forward some useful suggestions for effective English teaching .