Integration And Disintegration: A Systematic Evaluation Of Go For It!

Globally, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has become increasingly eye-catching in the past few decades. In China, the Ministry of Education issued the new National Curriculum Standards of English (referred to as Curriculum Standards henceforth) in 2001, which established TBLT as the favored methodology for teaching English in China. Go for it!, a textbook for junior high school students, was accordingly developed under the guidance of the Curriculum Standards. The present study investigates whether and how Go for it! abides by the Curriculum Standards and how TBLT finds its way into the textbook design. A holistic approach, i.e. an internal evaluation plus an external one, is adopted in the study. The internal evaluation sets out to examine 6 aspects of the textbook, i.e. (i) the treatment of topics, (ii) vocabulary, (iii) grammar, (iv) task design, (v) form-focused exercises and (vi) culture. The external evaluation is carried out in the form of a questionnaire survey for both learners and teachers using the textbook. The result indicates that Go for it! well abides by the new Curriculum Standards, and the learners and the teachers in the survey are generally satisfied with it, both giving it an average score over 80 (100 as the full score). In addition, problems are pointed out and suggestions on improvement are also made by the author and the subjects in the survey. Hopefully, the study may contribute to the general methodology in textbook evaluation and help textbook developers in the future adaptation and revision of Go for it! and in other textbook development programs.The paper consists of 5 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the research background, research questions and research significance. Chapter 2 reviews relevant literature on tasks, curriculum development, syllabus design and textbook evaluation. Chapter 3 is concerned with how the research is designed. Chapter 4 presents and discusses the results obtained from the internal and external evaluations. Chapter 5 concludes the study by listing major findings, implications and so on.