Evaluation Of Vocabulary And Subject Contents In Twenty-first Century College English

Suarez (2001) found that 98% of classroom instructions are from teaching materials, not teachers, and 90% of students'homework time is structured by materials. In China where college English is a compulsory course, the importance of textbooks is quite self-evident. However, facing the dazzling prosperity of publication, it is definitely no easy job in choosing an appropriate textbook. Most of the textbooks in wide use today were published after the year of 1999 and are generally considered to be the fourth generation. Yet, ten years has passed since the publication of them, during which period syllabus has been revised twice, whether these books still suit the requirements of the new version of College English Curriculum Requirement and the students'needs is the focus of the present study.Twenty-first Century College English is selected as the textbooks in question, and the aspects of vocabulary and subject matters are mainly evaluated. The first group of data acquired is the coverage of vocabulary of three levels (basic requirement, intermediate requirement and advanced requirement) in the whole book and Section A:77.91% and 65.40%,44.65% and 33.09%,22.31% and 14.39%, the study of coverage of vocabulary of the three levels in four bands of books reveals that there is gradient in the organization of vocabulary but not an explicit one, the studies of subject matters on the basis of classification and questionnaires find that there's much room of improvement in the selection of subject matters but organization of them is worthy of retaining.In a word, this evaluation not only exposes the problems existing in textbooks in question, it also provides proposition and guidance for the future textbook compilation.