The Study On The Authenticity Of The College English Textbooks

The research about authenticity of English teaching has become one of the hot topics in the foreign language teaching. With the development of the Communicative Language teaching movement, the definition of authenticity has become an important element to solve the problems in foreign language learning. It has great arguments after it is emerged all the time. Many researchers try to make a definition of authenticity, it seems to be very difficult, it is hard to get a consensus, and one of the reasons may be the variety of the authenticity. More and more researchers pay much attention to this field. The definition of authenticity has been always complex and abstract these years. Different people hold different opinions, and they do researches from different perspectives, such as motivation study, cross-cultural researches, communicative language teaching, and second language acquisition and so on.Meanwhile, in the field of applied linguistics, especially in the design of textbooks and language teaching fields, the authenticity of the texts has brought many arguments among the linguistics. There are some studies related with the authenticity of English textbooks, such as the study of the authenticity of Business English textbooks, or the authenticity of the listening English textbooks, etc. However, few have been done about authenticity focusing on the college English textbook. This thesis studies the current authenticity of the college English textbook from Liaoning normal university, the intensive reading. It was published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press in 2002, the second volume, and the chief complier is Zhai Xiangjun. The study addresses the following three research questions:1. According to Van Lier's (1996) theories, what is the authenticity of the college English textbook?2. What are the students'suggestions on the authenticity parts and non-authenticity parts of the textbook?3. What is the relationship between textbooks'authenticity and learners'autonomy?This thesis applies the methods of questionnaires analysis and interviews. The process of this research can be divided into three steps:1.present the theories about authenticity, including Van Lier's theories and other researchers'; 2.do the questionnaires and results analysis;3.analyze the reasons and present the implications.This thesis proves that: in the instructional field of this textbook, it lacks the authentic activities and real environments for applying language, the authentic tasks are less in the design of the textbook relatively.The significance of this thesis is to get enlightenment on the design of textbooks. And according to the in-depth analysis, it helps the development of college English teaching keeping up with times, and makes the teaching meet learners'need better.In this thesis, the results are analyzed in details. And implications are the research subjects and time limited, and further research on the authenticity of the textbooks should be done.