The Needs Analysis Of English Learners In Higher Vocational-technical Colleges&Evaluation Of Their English Textbooks

While among the various factors affecting English teaching and learning, teaching materials hold the extremely important status. With more and more different English teaching textbooks for higher vocational-technical education (HVTE) springing up in the market, it is of great significance to evaluate these textbooks.This study is an evaluation on Lingo College English Listening&Speaking Course based on Hutchinson and Waters’ model of needs analysis (1987), Cunningsworth’s checklists for listening and speaking (2002) and Cheng Xiaotang’s approaches of textbook evaluation (2002). The research questions are:1) What are the basic needs for higher vocational-technical college students to learn English?2) How does Lingo College English Listening&Speaking Course meet the needs of the learners?3) What are the students’and teachers’attitudes towards Lingo College English Listening&Speaking Course?This research consists of quantitative study and qualitative study.1. Quantitative study. It adopts questionnaires for90students selected at random from three classes of Computer, Gardening and Medical marketing majors of Grade2010in Yangzhou Vocational College of Environment and Resources. It consists of two parts:1) learners’needs analysis;2) textbook evaluation from learners’ perspective. The related data were processed by SPSS16.2. Qualitative study. It is done through interviews.10students and10college English teachers from the higher vocational-technical college are randomly chosen to participate in the interview. Their words were tape-recorded and transcribed.The results of the research have indicated that the students from the higher vocational-technical college take English course both for course requirement and future work. They want to know the culture of English-speaking countries by English language learning. They will use English in some occasions related to the environment and the nature of their work. Most of the students consider skills of listening and speaking more important from their identity and occasions and purposes of using English. From the perspective of students’ learning needs, Lingo College English Listening&Speaking Course basically meets the needs of students from the higher vocational-technical college in practicability, culture input and listening and speaking training.The teachers and the students involved in this research hold generally positive attitudes towards Lingo College English Listening&Speaking Course because it has the features of the rational arrangement of content, the well designed layout, the abundant learning resources, the wide range of topics, the authentic language and the meaningful context. However, there are still some points which are less satisfactory, such as improper progression of listening speed, unreasonably large amount of vocabulary and less recycling of new vocabulary and so on.Therefore, it is of great need for compilers to reedit the present textbooks to make improvement based on the suggestions and advice from the teachers and the students. As for teachers, they should be more flexible with the textbooks, modify the teaching materials properly by adding and deleting some parts to meet the objectives of the teaching and the needs of the students, so that they should maximize the positive role of the textbook.