Junior High School Geography Textbook Reform In A Comparative Study

The meaning of "geography teaching materials" has both broad and narrow sense. It's broad sense refers it as a system of textbooks; the narrow sense just refers to the geography teaching materials itself, this is what I studied in my paper. Geography teaching materials is of great importance. It is a useful tool in realizing the basic goal of education, and it also the basic material that teachers and students use in their teaching and studying. After China was founded, the development of our geography textbook has experienced seven stages, that are, the transition stage, the stage of learning the former U.S.S.R, the stage of education reform, the stage of "Great Cultural Revolution", the stage of reconstruction, the stage of further development and the stage of reform and innovation. Because textbook has their own characteristics in different stages, so there is great signification for us to study the difference between them. By doing this, we can not only explore the rule of geography textbook in China, but also can give us some references when compiling the new textbook. By comparing the textbook of China with that of the U.K, France, Japan, the U.S.A and Germany before the reform, we can find that the textbook in the above five countries all have different features. We can know that the general tendency of the development of geography textbook abroad is : first, the diversification of textbook; second, focusing on the function of moral education; third, anthropogeography is included in the teaching, forth, using special topic when compiling, and last, the expression of knowledge is more vivid.In my paper, I just choose two different editions of textbooks to study, one is the edition of 1987 and the other is the edition of 2001. According to the comparison, I summarize the main features of our geography textbook, they are: more stresses on the function of moral education and the development sustainable education; the structure of knowledge is more rationalized and is true of students' knowing how to do; much easier to learn and much wider of knowledge; payingmuch attention to the combination of three systems and the training of students' practice abilities. But there are still some limitations of our compulsory geography textbook after several years' putting into practice, the most important ones are presented in its structure, knowledge points, the image system and the training of ability.We are now carrying out reforms of teaching materials, I put forward my own opinion on the reforms of our geography teaching materials by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of our present teaching materials and further studying the standard of geography curriculum. When compiling new teaching materials, we must first know the elementary theory, such as, the compiling basis, the basic principle and new concept. Then we should put forward our new designing notion, such as, more stresses on the function of moral education, integrating affection, attitude and values together; forming the structure which can improve the development of the students; making the knowledge points modernized; optimizing the expressing system; focusing on students' innovative spirits and practice ability; systematizing the teaching materials and so on.From above, we can draw a conclusion that there is a tendency in our national geography textbook: diversification of geography textbook, modernization of geography textbook, individual geography textbook, practicality of geography textbook, synthesizing of geography textbook.