Evaluation On Reading Section Of New Standard English For Senior High School

Textbook plays a pivotal role in language teaching, which provides large amounts of language input for learners and offers practical reference of classroom practices for teachers. Besides, textbook is designed to balance relationship between language skills and knowledge. As a quite important part of English textbook, reading takes great proportion in language teaching and examination. In addition, improving students’ reading ability has always been the focus of English language teaching. However, in real practices, it is noticeable that teachers’unreasonable interpretation and use of reading materials in textbooks as well as lack of efficient reading strategy training make reading unsatisfactory, and they cannot reach the reading goals well. Therefore, it is urgent to make evaluation on reading section of textbooks. In recent years, most of researchers mainly focus on the systematic evaluation on the whole textbooks, or make evaluation from the perspective of grammar or vocabulary. Little work has been done to the field about the evaluation on reading section of textbooks. Though a few evaluations about the reading section are done, the research subjects are the college students. In order to compensate for the vacancy of the studies in this field and to better achieve the reading objectives required in the National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School (draft)(NECS), this thesis tries to make static and dynamic evaluations on reading section of New Standard English (Student’s Books1-5) published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, taking Chengdu as an example. The aim of the study is to figure out whether reading section of NSE meets the requirements of the NECS; whether reading section of NSE suits teachers and students in Chengdu; what the strengths and weaknesses of NSE are; what kind of adjustment should be made if NSE continues to be used.The thesis firstly introduces research background and significance of the study, followed by some theoretical bases of reading section compilation and reviewing previous studies on textbook evaluation. Then a working framework for reading section of NSE is proposed based on existent studies. Specifically, the study is conducted by static evaluation on reading section of NSE to explore how far reading section meets the requirements of the NECS. In static evaluation, NSE and reading section are firstly introduced from macroscopic perspective, and then reading materials and reading activities are evaluated from microscopic perspective. Apart from static evaluation, this study does dynamic evaluation by questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation in order to know the suitability of reading section of NSE in Chengdu. In dynamic evaluation, quantitative analysis of data and information is done by means of excel software.Through both static and dynamic evaluations, it is found that reading section of NSE to great extent meets not only the requirements of the NECS, but also the needs of teachers and students in Chengdu. Meanwhile, characteristics of reading section is as follows:rich topics and various genres, hierarchical vocabulary, word box with distinguishing productive words and receptive words, reading activities from easiness to difficulty, focusing on basic reading skills and strategies, permeation of both western culture and Chinese culture in the reading materials, and authenticity of language, etc. Nevertheless, NSE still needs to be improved in terms of interesting reading materials, fashionable topics, levels of questions, presentation ways of learning strategies, cultivation of critical thinking ability and teachers’professional development, etc.Finally, based on the study results, the thesis recommends corresponding suggestions for teachers, students, compilers, teaching and research supervisors and local educational administrative department in order to maximize the effect of employing textbooks. Teachers should shift their role to start student-centered teaching and adapt textbooks based on students’actual needs. Simultaneously, as textbook developers, teachers need to pay more attention to their own professional development, and self-monitor and self-reflect their teaching behavior to solve problems when encountering difficulties. As for students, they need to establish awareness of prominent position in learning, actively use NSE and increase the extracurricular reading volume. Also learning strategies need to be applied in learning practices with teachers’ scaffoldings so that their autonomous learning ability would be improved correspondingly. Compilers should take consideration of adding more interesting reading materials to reading section, noting the times of topics, designing proper levels of questions in reading activities, integrating more learning strategies in "Learning to learn" part and symbolizing core vocabularies, etc. Teaching and research supervisors need to lead teachers to study the NECS seriously and establish a scientific view of education, teachers, and textbook evaluation. Through efficient seminars or skills training of textbook evaluation, teachers are able to use textbooks appropriately. Local educational administrative department needs to know the actual situations of present textbooks used in senior high schools so as to consider whether the textbooks will continue to be used or not. They should choose proper textbooks for schools in different levels.Although the present thesis has tried to systematically make evaluation on reading section of New Standard English for senior high schools, it still has some limitations, mainly reflecting in the finite investigation subjects and the lack of variety in research techniques. Therefore, a wider range of subjects and a richer selection of research techniques are suggested for further study.