Study On Tasks In Comprehensive College English Textbooks

Textbooks play a very important role in English language teaching. It is the presentation ofmodern educational ideology, teaching principles and methods and learning theories. It has directconnection with language teaching and learning practices. Traditional college English textbookspay more attention on language usage and emphasize learners’ repeated practice of thosestructures, which is not so good for improvement of learners’ overall language proficiency. Withthe development of educational ideology, applied linguistics, second language acquisition theoriesand foreign language teaching theories, the content in foreign language textbooks has changed alittle. Some textbooks tried task-based approaches to help learners improve their languageproficiency.Having reviewed the related researches into the English textbooks and tasks at home andabroad, the study investigates the target needs and learning needs of college English course byelaborating on the College English Course Requirements and results from the Needs AnalysisQuestionnaire. Then this paper analyzes the language tasks in college English textbooks from twoperspectives of language knowledge and skills and foreign language teaching principles. Languageknowledge and skills refer to grammar and vocabulary knowledge, listening, speaking, reading,writing, translating skills. Foreign language teaching principles refer to the factors that should beconsidered while designing language tasks such as diversity, interestness, difficulty, authenticity,novelty. This study chooses two most widely used college comprehensive English textbooks--NewHorizon College English and New College English. Through both qualitative and quantitativeanalysis of the tasks in these two textbooks, it is found that a majority of learners are satisfied withthe textbooks but unsatisfied with tasks in the textbooks. They are quite unsatisfied with theinterestness, difficulty, diversity and theme-orientation of tasks in New Horizon College English.The learners are not so satisfied with the difficulty, theme-orientation and authenticity of tasks inNew College English.Good tasks can not only improve language proficiency but also cultivate learners’ motivationand learning autonomy. This paper intends to shed light on tasks design in college Englishtextbooks and provoke teachers’ thoughts on appropriate use of language tasks.