Evaluation And Design Of Reading Activities In Senior High School English Textbooks

The objective of reading teaching is to equip students with necessary reading skills and strategies, and improve their reading ability. Since coursebooks are a good resource in achieving those objectives, thus, careful selection and evaluation of coursebooks are of great significance and necessity.For a reading teaching program, the reading comprehension activities can to a large extent reflect its underlying principles and theories. In order to achieve the goals of reading teaching, they should aim at training comprehension skills, not testing comprehension outcome. However, in reality, a lot of textbooks still adopt a rather traditional approach, and they try to check that learners have understood every detail of the passage, but do little to develop techniques that can be transferred to other texts.Therefore, the present study sets out to analyze and evaluate the reading comprehension activities on the basis of relevant theories about reading and material evaluation. The research subjects are four sets of textbooks for senior high schools in China, and they are New Senior English For China by People’s Education Press, Advance with English by Oxford University Press, Senior High English by Beijing Normal University Press and New Standard English by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.The study employs a self-developed evaluation checklist, which consists of two parts: the content analysis of reading activities and the form analysis. The former part is used to check whether the content of the reading comprehension activities can reflect the aims and objectives of reading teaching:to cultivate and improve students’comprehensive reading ability; while the latter part is to examine whether the form of the reading comprehension activities conforms to the principles of activity design.The results are reported as follows. As to the content of the activities, all the four sets of textbooks tend to (1) stress the importance of anticipation, rhetorical patterns of the text, and inferring word meaning from contextual clues; (2) ignore the importance of prediction, function of the text, and inferring word meaning from word-formation rules; (3) design some meaningful and critical activities that are closely related to students’ experiences. However, they still place too much emphasis on testing students’ comprehension, with the high percentage of the skill-understanding explicitly stated information being an example.As to the form of the reading activities, all the textbooks (1) should try more other item formats than Q&A; (2) can conform to the sequence of activity design, but NSE tends to use too much shallow activities and AWE tends to begin with detailed understanding; (3) have clear and explicit directions, with NSEFC being an exception; (4) need to pay more attention to cooperative activities and activity recycling.Then suggestions are put forward in terms of how to design reading comprehension activities. They are divided into two parts, with the former one dealing with the content of the activities and the latter one the form. Hopefully, this study could be used as stepping-stones for future researches and be helpful for textbook editors and English teachers.