A Comparative Study Of NEC And ISE

Textbooks play a vital role in English language teaching. A suitable textbook is aresource for presentation materials and teaching activities and for learner practice onbasic knowledge and language skills as well. Textbooks serve teaching, in turn, act atteaching.With the enhancement of social demands for English professionals, thefoundational English teaching attracts more attention than ever, meanwhile, textbooksfor basic stage draw much concern from experts. From a large number of textbooks forEnglish majors (at foundational stage), the author chooses A New English Course(NEC) and Integrated Skills of English (ISE) as the objects of research. These two setsof textbooks are used widely at home by English majors at the foundational stage, andhave a great influence on English teaching. The research on these two sets of textbooksis scarce, therefore, a study on them become necessary.This study is based on Cunningsworth’s and Cheng Xiaotang’s syllabus theoriesand checklist for textbook evaluation, and takes literature research and data analyse asmethods, intending to compare these two sets of textbooks from the aspects ofprinciples, compilation system, content (discourse, basic knowledge, language skillsand culture) and auxiliary parts. And it focuses on addressing the following questions:1) What are the principles of NEC and ISE?2) Is the content a good resource for students to master the language?3) What are the similarities and differences between these two sets of textbooks?4) What are the strengths and weaknesses of these two sets of textbooks?The result shows that1) NEC takes functional syllabus as basis, Levels1-2focuson listening and speaking while Levels3-4emphasize reading and writing While ISE istask-based, in which listening, speaking, reading and writing are put in the sameposition at each level;2) Both of them have a wide range of topics, and the difficulty increases level by level that suits the regularity of mastering language;3) Based on thesame course syllabus, NEC pays much attention to the inputs and intensive trainingwhile ISE stresses the broadening of language knowledge like the added pronunciationand cultural information, and the training of teachers’ teaching ability;4) Even bothNEC and ISE take the latest linguistic theories and language teaching theories asbacking, part of the texts are still out of date and can not meet the demands of modernsociety.At the end of this thesis, the author gives several suggestions on textbookdevelopment and hopes to provide a reliable reference for the textbook users on thebasis of this detailed analysis.