| Course-books occupy a great position in the foreign language learning andteaching. Course-books are the core of the curriculum, which determine the contentand design of teaching. However, it’s not appropriate for all the students to use thesame textbook, especially, when differences exist between the students in rural areasand the students in urban city due to students’ language proficiency level, teachers’quality, teaching resources and etc. Therefore, course-book selection plays asignificant role in achieving teaching goals, particularly in rural middle schools.Many evaluations have been done on the course-books for universities, colleges andhigher vocational-technical schools, however, the evaluation on the course-book---GO FOR IT! used in rural middle school is scarce. Based on such a situation, thisstudy attempts to conduct a comprehensive analysis on GO FOR IT! used in ruraljunior middle school.The present study is designed to investigate the using of Junior Englishcourse-book GO FOR IT! in Yi’huang county. The subjects of this study are: theteachers (21from two different Junior Middle Schools), the students (320fromGrade2Junior Middle School). It attempts to explore the course-book in thefollowing aspects: the design and organization, the language content, the four basicskills, the topics and the methodology through two questionnaires done by theteachers and the students respectively, plus teachers’ interview. The Microsoft officesexcel was selected for the statistical analysis.A number of main findings have been revealed in the study. Firstly, the resultsshow that the Go For It! is the course-book that basically corresponds to the reformof our country’s English teaching. It is basically consistent with the New EnglishCurriculum Standard.Secondly, for the design and organization, more than half of teachers underinvestigation think the course-book is not suitable for the students in rural middleschool, which is different from most students’ opinions.Furthermore, the language content of Go For It! is also a little difficult for theteaching and learning in rural junior middle school, because of the large vocabularyand scattered grammar. Also the topics are isolated from rural junior middle school students’ life.Lastly, the skills and the methodology in the course-book---GO FOR IT! boththe covering of the four basic skills and the involving of the task-based languageteaching (TBLT) are consistent with the New English Curriculum Standard (2001),but according to the research, the teachers in rural schools pay more attention to thereading, less attention to the other three skills, they focus on the language pointsexplanation and they have little idea about the TBLT teaching method.In terms of the findings of the research, some suggestions for language teachingare provided for the teachers in rural schools, we should not only master theprofessional knowledge, but improve the language skills, research competence aswell as learning and teaching strategies, this will be further helpful to improving theresults of the language teaching in rural junior middle school. |
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