An Evaluation Of Learning English, A Junior Middle School Textbook Published By Hebei Education Press

Textbook is an important part of language teaching. It is not only the main medium through which learners master the language and the culture it carries but also the important instrument for educators to achieve the teaching objectives. With the development of English language teaching in our country, the traditional situation in which one syllabus is supported by one set of books has been broken up and several English textbooks can be published under the guidance of one syllabus. These textbooks have different perspectives and theory underpinnings, therefore, the emphases of the textbooks are different. Because of this, textbook evaluation is very useful for the quality of language teaching. The textbook Learning English used in the key junior middle school and common junior middle school of Xianyang city Shaanxi province is published by Hebei Education Press in collaboration with DC Canada International Communicative Center. Up to now there is no comprehensive evaluation made on this set of textbooks. This thesis reports the evaluation of Learning English from internal and external aspects.The internal evaluation in this research, guided by the New Curriculum Standard promulgated by the Ministry of Education, covers the language knowledge, language skills, cultural awareness, learning strategies and affective attitudes involved in the textbook. The external evaluation was made through the sample users of the textbook, who are25teachers and50students from a key junior middle school and10teachers and50students from a common junior middle school. A questionnaire is adopted to collect the sample users’evaluation on the textbook.Both internal and external evaluations indicate that Learning English mainly meets the requirements put forward by the New Curriculum Standard in its providing and organizing of language knowledge, language skills, cultural awareness, learning strategies and affective attitudes. The teachers and students investigated are generally satisfied with the aspects such as language style, language knowledge and language skills, etc. The problems revealed from the research are involved in three parts: listening materials are not related with real life, grammar as the significant part in language learning cannot fully meet teaching requirements, and the design of writing exercises is too simple. According to the result, the present researcher gives some suggestions on the improvement of this set of books in the next edition.