The Analysis Of New Senior English Forchina: Learner’s Topic Interest Perspective

The textbook functions not only as the primary basis of teaching activities but also the main content of students’ learning. The new National English Curriculum Standard(2003) holds that the textbook should accord with the characteristics of students’ age, psychology and cognitive development. In addition, an excellent textbook should include authentic language, extensive content and diversified topics. Therefore, How to choose English textbook which can perfectly match learners’ topic interests is very significant for the researchers.The study aims to find out the topic distribution features of New Senior English for China, the interesting topics for high school students and how the factors like gender and English level influence their topic choices. The study instruments include questionnaire, and literature. The subjects of the study include 347 high school students.The result shows that: 1) In terms of subject distribution, New Senior English for China reflects the characteristic of interdisciplinarity, and most of subject belongs to humanities. 2) In terms of learners’ topic interest characteristic, high school students are most interested in topics closely related to their daily life, while the uninteresting topics for them are those serious and abstract ones they feel. 3) In terms of the factors which influence topic interest, there are differences between males and females, and there are more significant differences between students with high scores and low scores.