| Advanced English, as an authoritative specialized text-book intended for English majors at the higher education stage, has attracted great attention and become very popular among English teachers and learners(especially for advanced English learners) since its very publication.Meanwhile, it is premise for English teachers to analyze the textbook deeply and grasp the designing essence and compiling characteristics if they want to make an effective use of and well develop the textbook. Therefore, it’s a particularly important task to analyze and evaluate Advanced English for this stage. However, many linguists have done such research mainly from the perspectives of teaching method, cultural background, rhetoric and translation in the past years, and up to the present time, no research has been done in terms of evaluation of the textbook from the perspective of genre and genre analysis. This study, under such circumstances,attempts to analyze and evaluate the textbook Advanced English(3rd edition) comprehensively guided by genre theory.This research mainly adopts the literature method, comparative method, careful reading and text analysis method. Based on Hasan’s “generic structure potential”(GSP), this research analyzes the textbook Advanced English(3rd edition, edited by Zhang Hanxi and revised by Wang Lili) printed by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2011, aiming to investigate how many genres are involved and what generic features the texts have. Meanwhile,this research finds out and analyzes the textbook’s merits and deficiencies, by comparing it with the requirements in terms of genre in the Teaching Syllabus for English Majors issued by Chinese ministry of education in 2005, and then tries to putforward some feasible suggestions for the future textbook designers.The final results indicate that:(1) There are mainly four genres: narration, argumentation,exposition and description in the textbook Advanced English(3rd edition). From the genres distribution pattern, it can be seen that narration genre makes up nearly half of the total of 30lessons(47%), while argumentation genre and exposition genre occupy the same proportion with25%. However, description genre only makes up the least proportion, only 3%;(2)Based on Hasan’s “Generic Structure Potential”(GSP) and the generic features of each genre, different genres have different social purposes. What’s more, the generic structure and their linguistic features are also totally different. In Hasan’s opinion, if one GSP can represent all structure potentials in discourse genre, three parts are involved in GSP. They are all the obligatory ingredients of discourse Structure, all the optional ingredients of discourse Structure and the order of the obligatory ingredients and optional ingredients, including the possibility of repeat;(3)The four different genres in the textbook basically agree with the requirements of the Teaching syllabus for English Majors. However, the distribution pattern of genres indicates that narration plays the totally large proportion while the description is mostly meagre. It leads to the uneven distribution of the four different genres. According to the results from comparative analysis above, this research suggests that future textbook designers should firstly consider narration genre can be reduced and the description genre can be increased, to ensure every genre be evenly distributed and meet learners’ need in the future textbooks. Secondly, textbook should also reflect the principle of “step by step”, and “ensure that important language content have higher recurrence rate”, so that the teaching materials are more suitable for the needs of students’ development.There still exist some deficiencies in this research because of limited time and conditions.For example, the study on genre concept is not deep enough and the texts selected are limited,leaving some other newly added high-quality texts investigated less deeply. Nevertheless, the study has reached the expected goals, not only widening the application of the theory of genre analysis, but also providing some beneficial suggestions for the evaluation of the advanced textbooks, even for the future teaching and research, and textbook designers. |
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