Evaluation Of The Tasks In Go For It Based On The New Curriculum Standards

Teaching materials always play an important part in English teaching, and the quality of teaching materials relates much with the quality of teaching effects. Accordingly, teaching materials’ development must be an essential part of language education improvements, and finding shortcomings and perfecting them are helpful for improving teaching effects.As for the evaluation and compilation principles, Ministry of Education has established a series of standards for them — the New Curriculum. The New Curriculum is the requirements for basic education in China, advocating advanced and efficient teaching concepts to revolute the basic education in China. And the New Curriculum has been criteria to assess the quality of teaching and teaching materials. Go for it is a set of English teaching materials widely used in middle school in China, published by People’s Education Press. It is adapted from the original Go for it series compiled by David Nunan. The teaching materials take use of task-based language teaching mode, and arrange lots of tasks in each unit to form task chains, therefore tasks’ quality has much to do with the quality of teaching materials and teaching quality. Tasks evaluation is an essential part of reflection to the series of teaching materials and improves the quality of teaching materials, in order to develop language teaching effects.This thesis attempts to evaluate the tasks in Go for it by assessing whether the task arrangement conforms to the principles in the New Curriculum. It describes the tasks based on task type, tasks difficulty and task distribution. As for the task difficulty aspect, the thesis makes questionnaire surveys to 100 students and 60 teachers in secondary schools from Guilin city by asking them to score some items which may affect the tasks difficulty. After describing tasks characteristics from the three aspects, and by referring to the interviews with 20 teachers and 20 students in middle school from Guilin city, this thesis finds out the merits and demerits of these tasks.Based on the shortcomings, the thesis comes up with some suggestions for the improvement of tasks in teaching materials, such as focusing more on the local culture’s integrating with authentic language, adapting proper task sequence by teachers, and making outline and pre-task activity before doing tasks. As teachers are guiders and implementers in classroom tasks, this thesis also puts up with some suggestions for teachers in practical teaching. After the tasks evaluation, the author also finds out some pedagogical implications to fixture language teaching. Firstly, before designing tasks, compilers should make researches on the learners’ and teachers’ needs; secondly, teachers have to play important role in teaching materials compilation; thirdly, there should be some self-learning tasks in teaching materials.Then the thesis comes to a conclusion that the tasks design in Go for it accords with the New Curriculum Standards in whole, and there are still some shortcomings, I wish the compilers should pay attention to in the future, and teachers should improve teaching activities according to learners’ real levels. There are still some limitations in the research.