Evaluation Of The Tasks In "Go For It" From The Perspective Of The New Curriculum

Teaching materials always play an important role in English teaching, and the quality of teaching materials relate much with the quality of teaching effects. Accordingly, teaching materials development must be an essential part of language education improvements, and finding shortcomings and perfecting them are helpful for improving teaching effects.As for the evaluation and compilation principles, Ministry of Education has established a series of standards for them-the New Curriculum. The New Curriculum is the requirements for basic education in China, advocating advanced and efficient teaching concepts to revolute the basic education in China. And the New Curriculum has been criteria to assess the quality of teaching and teaching materials. Go for it are widely used middle school English teaching materials in China published by People’s Education Press, which is adapted from the original Go for it series compiled by David Nunan. The teaching materials take use of task-based language teaching mode, and arrange lots of tasks in each unit forming task chains, therefore tasks quality concerns much with the quality of teaching materials and teaching quality. Tasks evaluation is an essential part of reflection to the series of teaching materials and improves the quality of teaching materials, in order to develop language teaching effects.This thesis attempts to evaluate the tasks in Go for it by assessing whether the task arrangement conforms to the principles in New Curriculum. It describes the tasks based on task type, tasks difficulty and task distribution. As for the task difficulty aspect, the thesis makes questionnaire surveys to50students and50teachers in secondary schools from Wuhan city by asking them to score some items which may affect the tasks difficulty. After describing tasks characteristics from the three aspect, the thesis finds out the merits and demerits of these tasks combining with the interviews to10teachers and10students in middle school from Wuhan city, because they are the most direct users of the teaching materials.On the basis of the shortcomings, the thesis comes up with some suggestions for the improvement of tasks in teaching materials, such as focusing more on local culture integrating with authentic language, adapting proper task sequence by teachers, and making outline and pre-task activity before doing tasks. As teachers are guiders and implementers in classroom tasks, this thesis also puts up with some suggestions for teachers in practical teaching. After the tasks evaluation, the author also finds out some pedagogical implications to future language teaching. Firstly, before designing tasks, compilers should make researches on the learners’ and teachers’ needs; secondly, teachers have to play important role in teaching materials compilation; thirdly, there should be some self-learning tasks in teaching materials; lastly, establishing criteria for task evaluation is necessary in future research.Then the thesis comes to conclusion that the tasks design in Go for it accords with the New Curriculum in whole, and there are still some shortcomings compilers should pay attention to in the future compiling, and teachers should improve teaching activities according to learners’ real levels.