Corpus-assisted Business English Textbook Evaluation

Textbooks are one of the most important elements in language teaching. And it is stillso in the field of business English. In China, one reality which should not be overlookedis that most of the business English teachers are without any knowledge or workingexperience in business. In this case, business English textbooks have become the vitalsource of teaching contents. However, at present the theories of business English are notmature enough to provide sound standards for compiling business English textbooks.Opposite to the lack of standards, there is a surprisingly large amount of business Englishtextbooks available on the market. As a result, how to choose the right textbook becomesa thorny issue for both teachers and learners.This study aims to find a method to effectively evaluate business English textbooksfor textbook selection. It conducts a case study on the evaluation of Market LeaderElementary–a widely used business English textbook by a lot of colleges andeducational institutions in China. In the case study here, it is adopted by a businessEnglish training programme in the college of Continuing Education, GuangdongUniversity of Foreign Studies.In this study, the traditional check-list method of evaluation is combined with corpusanalysis. A tailored check-list will be drawn up based on the evaluation rules ofCunningsworth and McDonough&Shaw and the needs of learners. Corpus analysissoftwares are employed to describe the performance of the textbook in certain aspectswhich are determined by the check-list so as to facilitate discovering the features of thetextbook. The results reveal that the textbook has good performance in assisting teachingand learning and in providing the very business related English. However, it doesn t havea good coverage of vocabulary form junior middle school, which makes it difficult for thelearners most of whom just graduated from junior middle schools to start as there aremore new words than familiar ones. It doesn t cover enough vocabulary of PETS2orBEC Preliminary which, however, are the stated objective of the training programme and the subjective goals of learners. And the difficulty arrangement among texts is not in areasonably order. It becomes clear that the Market Leader Elementary is not a goodchoice for the training programme.From this case study, it is clear that the corpus analysis tools are quite helpful inproviding objective description of a textbook. Since that the business English discipline isstill under construction and that there is a lack of standards for business English textbookcompilation and evaluation, this combination of check-list and corpus analysis willcontribute a lot to the textbook selection decision making.