A Comparative Study Of Junior High School English Textbooks Published By Visang Education Press In Korea And Shandong Education Press In China

Textbooks serve as the source of students’ learning, the main tool of teaching and the access to achieve the goal of course designing, thus, the rational analysis to the teaching material is necessary. The author chooses Middle School English published by Visang Education Press in Korea and the Compulsory Education English textbooks published by Shandong Education Press in China for analysis. It is different from most scholars in this field. The author uses comparative method and documentary method to analyze these two sets of teaching materials on the surface-layer structure and deep-layer structure which are pointed out by Ding Zhaopeng, and summarize the good and bad points respectively. In this paper, the surface-layer structure refers to compilation system, content selection, column design, and illustration, and the deep-layer structure refers to emotional attitudes, culture awareness factors, language knowledge and skill factors.The research questions in this study are listed as follows:1. What are the similarities and differences between these two textbooks through the analysis of surface-layer structure?2. What are the similarities and differences between these two textbooks through the analysis of deep-layer structure?3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of these two textbooks?The research findings show that from the aspect of the surface-layer structure, the compilation system of VEP(short for Visang Education Press) is much logical than that of SEP(short for Shandong Education Press). VEP pays much attention to affective education while SEP focuses on students’ daily life. The column designs of the two textbooks are also showed in different way and the illustrations in VEP are quite vivid and colorful than SEP. From the deep-layer structure, VEP focuses on cultivating students’ divergent thinking ability, while SEP focuses on the affections related to students’ daily life. VEP introduces the western cultures and national cultures at thesame time, while there are not many western culture introductions in SEP. In terms of language knowledge, VEP focuses on students’ communication ability instead of grammar while SEP focuses more on students’ grammar ability.Thus, the author gives some implications for the textbook editors in Shandong Education Press. From the aspect of surface-layer structure, put the units which are in similar topics into a group, add some new contents which are full of humanism, change the original column design into a more clear and systemic one and add some vivid illustrations moderately. From the aspect of deep-layer structure, pay more attention to the emotional education, add some culture introduction specifically, add some phonetic teaching in every unit instead of in grade six only, and reduce some difficult words and difficult grammars which are not suitable for junior high students.