A Comparative Study On College English Listening And Speaking Coursebooks In The Perspective Of Communicative Method

Coursebooks play an important part in stabilizing teaching order,ensuring quality of teaching, innovating teaching contents, as well asdirecting teaching reform in college English teaching. Yet, faced with awide range of college English listening and speaking coursebooks, howto evaluate their advantages and disadvantages with a scientificmethod has become an urgent issue.Currently, most teachers only use coursebooks to teach, regardingcoursebooks as one of their final teaching objectives, but it is graduallysignificant for teachers to know how to analyze and evaluate thecurriculum and know how to redevelop and wisely use coursbooks.Hence, based on the latest Communicative Language Teachingtheories (CLT), this thesis is going to make an in-depth comparativestudy on listening and speaking coursebooks between New HorizonCollege English (NHCE) and Soundwaves in order to offer advice forstudents and teachers to make reasonable and effective use of andredevelop the materials in the coursebooks, and also to venture somesuggestions in light of Communicative Language Teaching in China.The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One gives arationale of the research and provides an overall structure of the paper.Chapter Two is devoted to an in-depth review of relevant researcheson coursebooks home and abroad. Chapter Three explores the use ofCommunicative Teaching Method and whether the coursebooks meetcurriculum requirements. Chapter Four is a case study with reference toa macro-comparison in view of guiding ideology, key principles ofsyllabus design and the teaching purposes and requirements. ChapterFive is a further case study with reference to the micro-comparison witha view to text analysis, language skills, exercises and teacher’s books.This chapter makes use of corpus techniques to analyze the discourse of two sets of coursebooks. Chapter Six gives some pedagogicalimplications and suggestions for teachers and concludes the thesis.Advantages and disadvantages of the two listening and speakingcoursebooks are discussed and suggestions are put forward with thehope that this thesis will be a reference point in exploiting coursebooksto meet varying student needs, on the one hand, on the other hand,that the comparison will help current users of the two coursebooksadapt them more effectively and the CLT Method could provide auseful guidance for college English teachers to embody therequirements of the curriculum.