An Analysis And Evaluation Of Fun With English For Primary Schools In Jiangsu

With the implementation of English curriculum reform and establishment of the National English Curriculum Standards (NECS), many publishing houses published a series of distinctive English textbooks compiled by famous experts at home and abroad. Textbook is the core of curriculum, which has direct impact on teaching quality, so it is very important to analyze and evaluate textbook.This study mainly consists of two sections, firstly, the author analyzes Fum with English from the perspective of guidelines, structure and components and overall language ability, including language knowledge, language skills, affect and attitude, learning strategies, cultural awareness. Secondly, questionnaire investigation has been carried out among teachers and students in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province.The author summarizes the strength and weakness of Fun with English through the static and dynamic study. The major findings of the study are as follows:1) In general,Fun with English is in full agreement of the requirements of the NECS. The difficulty level is moderate. The contents are in accordance with the physical and psychological characteristics of primary school students. Students and teachers speak highly of this set of textbooks.2) Fun with English pays attention to help students master learning strategies. It arranges different kinds of activities and tasks to improve students’ ability of cooperative and gain learning skills.3) Fun with English contains many language points but they are a little scattered. The recycling rate of some language points is not high.4) Fun with English emphasizes the training of listening and speaking.5) Fun with English helps students set up cross-cultural awareness and overcome the barriers in cross-cultural communication. But cultural contents in this set of textbooks are not so rich, it is good to add more cultural contents, such as customs in western countries, places of interest, communication rules etc, to widen the span of knowledge and stimulate students’ interest in English learning.At last, some suggestions have been offered to teachers and compilers in using and perfecting this set of textbooks respectively.There are also some limitations of this study. Firstly, the author only chooses teachers and students from six primary schools as research subjects owing to the limited time and energy, so the research result is not highly representative. Secondly, the author does not investigate the compilers of Fun with English. The analysis and evaluation of this set of textbooks will be better if the author has chance to interview the compilers.