Analysis And Evaluation Of Two Sets Of Listening Textbooks For English Majors

It is believed that listening, as the major channel for language input, plays a significant role in communication and should be attached more importance to in language teaching and learning. Although the past years have witnessed the prosperity of studies on foreign language listening and EFL materials evaluation, there are few researches on EFL listening textbook evaluation, especially for English majors.This thesis constructs an EFL listening textbook evaluation framework for English majors and conducts a comprehensive evaluation of two sets of currently in-use EFL listening textbooks for English majors, namely, Listen This Way (LTW) published by Higher Education Press, and A Listening Course (ALC) published by Shanghai Foreign Language Press. It is expected to explore whether English majors are satisfied with the currently in-use listening textbooks and whether the two sets of textbooks meet users’ needs based on the newly constructed working model for listening textbook evaluation.On the one hand, this thesis makes an internal evaluation first in terms of an overall evaluation and a detailed evaluation of the two sets of listening textbooks, and then an external evaluation in order to investigate the feedback from their users. On the other hand, needs analysis is made to elicit students’ target needs and learning needs. The Textbook Evaluation Questionnaire (TEQ) and the Needs Analysis Questionnaire (NAQ) are distributed to295English majors from two different universities.The results show that the participants are satisfied with the two sets of listening textbooks and the students of ALC show more satisfaction than those of LTW. However, the results also reveal that neither LTW nor ALC is interesting enough to attract students and tasks involved in the two textbooks seem to lack authenticity, which may to some degree dampen students’ motivation. Moreover, there is still much room for the two sets of listening textbooks to improve so as to cultivate students’ communicative competence. The results from needs analysis show that neither LTW nor ALC can completely accord with the characteristics of ideal textbooks in learners’ minds, although they can more or less meet some of the needs. It is expected that this thesis will inspire the teaching materials compilers to some extent to compile textbooks with better quality, and provide teachers with some suggestions to make better use of the textbooks by adapting some of the contents with the merits and demerits of the textbooks in mind.