A Comparative Analysis Of Text Difficulty Of Reading Coursebooks Between English Major And Business English Major

During the selection process of reading materials, it is commonly agreed that text difficulty is one of the key factors to consider since it has an active impact on the cultivation of students’ basic language ability. However, in the past research on the evaluation of BE teaching materials, few specific studies are dedicated to the evaluation on text difficulty, so it is necessary to fill this gap. As English major has decades of history since its inception, while BE major was just approved as a newly separate major in 2007. By contrast, English major has much more experience in reading material selection and can better reflect the requirements of the syllabus than BE major.Therefore, this study chooses an English textbook, which is widely used, namely Contemporary College English: Intensive Reading(CCEIR), as the ideal standard to make a comparison with a BE coursebook, namely Experiencing Business English Integrated Coursebook(EBEIC), from the combination of qualitative study and quantitative study in terms of text variables including vocabulary difficulty, syntactic complexity, cohesion, text readability, rhetorical modes, text topics as well as text genres, which have a prediction on text difficulty.The result shows that texts in EBEIC Book One are much easier than that of CCEIR, while as for the other three volumes, EBEIC is testified to be more complex.Besides, topics in EBEIC tend to lack humanism and genres in EBEIC are not extensive enough as are those in CCEIR, which makes the differences in the use of rhetorical modes. In addition, it appears that the compilation of text difficulty in CCEIR conforms to the regularity of second language acquisition while there is no evidence of linear change across volumes in EBEIC. This research will not only provide a new thought to material evaluation but also will give some insights into the teaching, selection and adaptation of BE reading texts.