Research On Requirements For Lexical Syllabus And Teaching Outline Of English Majors On Novel Reading

English Teaching Outline of English majors serves as a guide for college education on English majors, which gives detailed description about the cultivation objectives and the course design requirements for English Majors. The Lexicon for English majors is an important endorsement of the outline. Whether the latter can match the requirements of the former determines the feasibility of both documents. This study is going to examine it from the lexical part, and it has profound significance as it can examine the reasonability of the two documents and promote some revising suggestions. Besides, as there are few studies concerned with Chinese teaching outline of English majors, and no studies related to explore the relationship between the documents mentioned above, so there are some creativeness in this study.In this study, the researcher chose the novel reading part to examine whether the words listed in the lexical syllabus can meet the requirements of the teaching outline. And three books i.e. Sons and Lovers, the Great Gats by and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that are listed in the reading part of the teaching outline were chosen as research materials. The study concerns such main concepts as lexical coverage, word frequency, tokens and word families. During the research, a software Range that is designed to analyze word frequency and a website www.lextutor.ca which has a function of familizing given words were used to aid the analysis.With the help of the two tools, the researcher carried out two experiments. In the first experiment, the researcher created his own baseword lists which is an analyzing part of Range, based on the Lexicon for English majors, in order to examine the lexical coverage of the research material. In the second experiment, the researcher used the original baseword lists of Range to examine the word frequency distribution of the research material. The results of the two experiments unanimously indicate that for the novel Sons and Lovers that are recommended in lower grades, the lexical syllabus cannot support an easy understanding for students on lexical part. For the Great Gatsby and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which are recommended in the higher grades of English majors, however, the lexical syllabus can meet the requirements of the teaching outline on lexical part.Based on the results of the experiments, the researcher promotes that the novel Sons and Lovers recommended in the teaching outline should be substituted by a lexically easier novel or the size of the lexical syllabus for English majors in their lower grades should be enlarged so that the teaching outline and the lexical syllabus of English majors can match with each other better. Besides that, we propose that students and teachers should select appropriate texts according to students’vocabulary level to read in practical teaching and learning.