A Quantitative Analysis And Evaluation Of The Contents Of Two College English Reading And Writing Textbooks

College English textbooks are vital media in college English education. With the diversification and multiplying of college English textbooks, the quality of textbooks are accordingly uneven. Therefore, it’s important to analyze and evaluate the textbooks. Traditional textbooks analysis and evaluation are mainly qualitative which are based on certain English textbook evaluation theories and criteria. As technology and theories develop and the emergence of textbook corpora, database and analyzing software, a new trend of combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis of vocabulary, lexical density, sentence length and readability in textbook evaluation appeared.In this study, textbook evaluation and analysis consist of an overall evaluation and a qualitative evaluation. Based on the self-built corpus of New Horizon College English textbooks Book1and Book2and New Vision College English textbooks Book1and Book2, McDonough and Shaw’s (1993), Cheng Xiaotang’s (2002) textbook evaluating theories and CECR, this study has conducted specific evaluation and analysis of the textbooks in the following three points:1) The quantity of types, tokens and clusters of each book of the four chosen college English textbooks.2) The diversity of genres and topics in each textbook and the new vocabulary distributing tendency of each unit in each textbook.3) The features of lexical density, mean sentence length and mean text length to analyze text readability of each textbook. It shows that four textbooks are similar in the compiling of the teaching contents and their features with reasonable arrangement, abundant contents, modern features and the emphasis on developing students’ integrated language skills. However, disadvantages of providing inadequate assistive materials or resources, controlling the readability of each book, and the uneven quantity trend of new words in each unit are discovered. The analysis are conducted in analyzes the quantity of types, tokens and clusters of each book, the diversity of genres and topics in each textbook and the new vocabulary tendency of each unit in each textbook, the coverage on the requirements of CECR and the features of lexical density, lemma, mean sentence length and mean text length to analyze text readability of each textbook. With a synthetic evaluation, by keeping the coherence and consistency and controlling the readability, NHCE-RW textbooks are more outstanding and logical than NVCERW textbooks.In a word, comprehensive evaluation makes the evaluating process more objective and comprehensive, and reduces the possible interference of textbook users’ different background, interests and preference. This paper also presents advice on textbook compelling and the application of textbooks to offer references for textbook evaluation, textbook users and EFLT.