In-Depth Evaluation On The Tasks In New Senior English For China

English textbooks play a unique role in English teaching. It is the main source of language input for students to acquire language knowledge and skills, and to promote their all-round abilities. Besides, it is the valuable source for teachers in English teaching as a well-designed textbook can provide them with teaching methods, teaching objectives, teaching contents, good exercises and tasks.Xia Jimei (2002) proposed that the fundamental shift of the roles and relationship between teachers and students is by means of exercises. Exercises/tasks design, undoubtedly, is one of the most significant components in textbooks writing, as it embodies the teaching methods, teaching philosophy, learning theories and guidance ideology of textbook compilation. Also, the quality of tasks is one of the most important criteria for both the choice and evaluation of modern foreign textbooks. The present study adopts the definition of task given by Breen (1987) and Littlejohn (1998), which refers to both communicative tasks and traditional exercises.After making a literature review of the researches on the English textbooks and the exercise/tasks studies at home and abroad, this study puts forward a theoretical framework of designing tasks for the textbooks of New Senor English for China (NSEC), mainly on the basis of communicative competence theory, autonomous learning theory, the National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools (2003) and the cognitive process of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The framework comprises five interrelated dimensions. They are language knowledge, language skills, learning strategies, cultural awareness, and cognitive competence. With this theoretical framework, the present study has conducted an in-depth tasks evaluation in New Senior English for China (Books 1-5) by analyzing the instructions and contents of tasks.There are 613 tasks in NSEC. From the systematic and detailed qualitative and statistical analyses, major findings can be drawn in this study:Taken as a whole, tasks design in NSEC basically reaches the requirements of the Standards; and the tasks cover all the six categories of cognitive process while category of understanding is most emphasized. The merits of tasks design in NSEC are as follows:1) the tasks are designed based on the topic and texts of each unit. Especially the tasks of new words, expressions and structures are those which have presented in texts. Besides, the tasks are rich in content and cover a wide range of topics which are closely related to students’daily life; 2) NSEC attaches importance to the training of the integrated skills; 3) the tasks encourage cooperative learning, self-evaluation and peer-evaluation by pair work, group works and presentation; 4) NESC focuses on global issues and the cultivation of students’ global consciousness; 5) NSEC not only pays attention to "the storage of knowledge" but also "the transfer of it". However, tasks in NSEC bear the following defects:1) Tasks designed in NSEC don’t fully embody the cultivation of communication strategies although the tasks cover almost the objectives required in NECS; 2) NSEC doesn’t fully embody the idea of learner autonomy as there isn’t any task in textbooks concerning guiding students to set study goals and make plans; 3) NSEC doesn’t provide students with the optional tasks.At the end of the thesis, some implications are put forward for tasks design in English textbooks, as well as some recommendations for further study.