An Investigation On The Use Of Teaching Materials For Secondary Vocational Schools

All kinds of teaching activities are organized around text book in teaching process, and the form and content of teaching largely depend on the text book which reflects the author's teaching principles and teaching methods. Text book is the centre of course resources, and the quality of text book is one of the main factors influencing teaching quality.With the further development of the teaching reform in the secondary vocational education field, reform of the basic courses is inevitable and necessary. As one of the basic subjects, English is the key link of basic courses. Author of the thesis thinks that reforming English teaching materials is one of the most important tasks in improving teaching quality of the secondary vocational school(SVS).Although a great number of studies about English teaching materials existed at home and abroad, there is very little research specializing in the English text books for secondary vocational education, so it's a duty for each SVS English teacher to make research on English text books. With the help of questionnaire and interview, based on some theories of education, linguistics, language learning, language teaching and teaching materials evaluation, author of this paper made the thorough and meticulous investigation on the use of the English text book for vocational school among the teachers and students in Tangshan Foreign Economic and Trade School, in order to find out the strong points and weak points of this text book. Most important of all, author analyzed what caused these weak points, and at the end of the paper, some proposals about how to use the text book. were given based on the author's own teaching experience.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one shows the background and significance of the study; chapter two is the literature review. Some relevant theories and studies about teaching materials existing at home and abroad are systematically illustrated, such as the definition of teaching materials, the role of materials, the principles in materials development and the principles for materials evaluation as well. Some relevant theories and studies about SVS English textbooks are further discussed, including the development and the evaluation criteria of SVS English materials. Moreover, the theoretical bases of this paper are explained as well in chapter two; chapter three and chapter four are the main body of the thesis, the author makes a detailed investigation on the use of the teaching materials, with the questionnaire surveys conducted among 26 teachers and 489 students, and interviews made with some teachers and students. The most important thing is that the results of the questionnaire and the interview are analyzed and explained in detail in chapter four; As for the advantages and disadvantages of the text book, some proposals from the point of the text book itself and the teachers as well as the limitations of the study, author mentioned them in chapter five.