Needs-Based Evaluation Of Vocational College English Textbook

The Public English is a compulsory course in vocational education and the textbook is an important part of English teaching in vocational colleges, which matters the specific implementation of the syllabus and English curriculum. The textbook is the main basis for teachers to organize English teaching activities in class and is the central content for learners to study English. Due to the fact that students’ English proficiency in these colleges is relatively low, they are largely dependent on English textbooks towards English learning, so the positive role of the textbook must be brought into the maximum extent in College English Teaching. As the Basic Requirements for Vocational English Teaching (2000) has been implemented, a large number of the vocational English textbooks have been published. However, large numbers are not equal to high quality. Therefore, how to choose a high-quality textbook that is suitable for students becomes a problem and it is necessary to evaluate the textbook used in vocational college.Taking Hubei Youth Vocational College as an example, this study starts from students’ actual situation of English study and constructs a framework of textbook evaluation based on evaluation theories at home and abroad. The newly-built framework is divided into two stages:internal evaluation and external evaluation. The former aims to assess whether the textbook is scientific, rational and effective by analyzing the five aspects:instructional objectives, textbook design, language content, topics, English knowledge and skills; the latter aims to measure whether this textbook is suitable for students in this college.This study will make an internal evaluation and external evaluation towards the English book Innovation College English--An Integrated Course used in this college. The qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted. The data come mainly from the corpus of the questionnaire and the textbook itself and they are input into the computer software Excel for quantitative analysis. After that, the author makes a comprehensive analysis by combining internal evaluation and external evaluation under the perspective of instructional objectives, textbook design, language content, topics, English knowledge and skills.The evaluation results indicate that the textbook Innovation College English--An Integrated Course is basically in line with students’ English learning needs. This textbook follows the teaching philosophy of people-oriented, takes language communication as a purpose and communicative tasks as a center and combines language knowledge with English skills closely. With authentic materials, profound language content, wide-ranged topics, ample classroom activities and various forms of exercises, this textbook focuses on training students’ comprehensive skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Nevertheless, there are still some disadvantages of the textbook and it needs to be improved. For instance, there are too much new vocabularies appearing in the reading passages; the quantity of exercises is a bit large and the skills to do the exercises haven’t been provided.Theoretically, the results of this study can help textbook users to hold a better understanding of its advantages and disadvantages in order to bring the role of textbook into maximum. From the point of practice, it makes contributions to promote English teaching quality and improve students’ English proficiency and their ability of language application.