A Study On The Readability Of English Textbooks For Senior High Schools

As a carrier to convey the New Curriculum Idea, textbook plays an important role to cultivate students’ knowledge, skills and emotion. Textbook plays an important role to students’ development, while the readability of textbook is the most basic of the basic; it is the foundation and guarantee for the textbook to become effective.Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation method is used to evaluate the readability of high school English textbook upon the previous studies. Combining with included researchers’ view on English textbook and the terchers and students’ view, we construct an evaluation model of high school English teaching material readability based on certain theoretical foundation and operable evaluation index system to evaluate the readability of the high school English teaching materials. Four factors are adopted: knowledge content, organizational structure, language style and the layout. Each factor contains eight secondary indicators.The result of the evaluation is that most of the teachers and students think the readability of English textbooks for high schools is good, but problems still exist:Firstly, there still exist too much difficult vocabulary and the polysyllabic vocabulary that affects the readability of the textbooks.Secondly, some knowledge presented in the textbooks is not familar to students’ learning experience and living environment, so students feel difficult to understand it. Thirdly, some paragraphs of the teaching material are too long; the students can’t understand the material easily. Fourthly, the page layout of the textbook is not attractive enough to students.Six parts comprise this article:The introduction is the first part. This part analyses the reason for the research, the significance and the related research status quo of textbook evaluation.The definition of the concepts in the study and the related theoretical basis are the second part. The concepts include textbook, English textbook, textbook evaluation and the readability of English textbook. The study defines the readability as the extent of understanding the particular material for specific readers; it actually means the extent of understanding the English textbook (pressed by People’s Education Press) of senior high school for senior high school students in this study. This study is instructed by the constructivism theory, krashen "Input Hypothesis" and cognitive learning theory.Part three is the design of this study. This part mainly contains the research purpose, the research methods and the research object.The fourth part is the construction of evaluation index system about the readability of high school English textbook.This part construct the evaluation index system about the readability of high school English textbook through comprehensively analyzing the related research of textbook evaluation at home and abroad. The index system includes four primary indexes (the readability of knowledge content, organization structure, the readability of language style and typography and design) and the corresponding secondary indexes. Based on the index system, we design the corresponding teachers’ evaluation questionnaire and students’ evaluation questionnaire, then questionnaires are used to survey the teachers and students, and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation is used to weight the evaluation index system and then amend it by Judgment Matrix, finally we get the weight allocation of each index.Part five is the comprehensive evaluation.This part mainly uses the questionnaire (for teacher) and the questionnaire (for student) to survey the teachers and the students in senior high school so as to fuzzy comprehensively evaluate the readability of English textbooks of senior high school.The conclusion and suggestion are in the sixth part. On the basis of comprehensively analyzing the related literature at home and abroad, the constructing of the evaluation index about the readability of high school English textbook, the surveying to the teachers and students and the analyzing of the evaluation result, the conclusion is that, generally speaking, the readability of English textbook is not bad, but there also exist certain problems in some respects. We also put forward the corresponding Suggestions for relevant personage reference.The last part is the conclusion, it gives a summary of this study, and then some deficiencies are put forword, and it also provides a further direction for researchers.