An Evaluation Of The Current Junior Middle School English Textbooks In China

The textbooks play an important role in teaching, which are the main contents of classroom teaching as well as the primary media of teaching activities between teachers and students. In English teaching, the importance of textbooks is obvious,because the language materials in textbooks are the major sources of students’ language knowledge acquisition and language skills mastery, and the language practices and exercises in textbooks are the main ways for students to learn language knowledge and develop language skills. The high-level and high-quality textbooks are the guarantee of the improvement of the quality of English teaching. The implementation of the new round of English curriculum reform and the promotion of the New Curriculum Standards put forward many new requirements for English textbooks, and lead to the emergence of a large number of new English textbooks. That puts the subject of the evaluation of the current English textbooks on the agenda.Therefore, the author takes four sets of English textbooks in junior middle school,including PEP edition, Ren’ai edition, YL edition and Hebei edition, as samples to evaluate and analyze the English textbooks of junior middle school in China, to find the similarities and differences among the textbooks as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each set of textbook, and to provide some suggestions on textbook use and textbook compilation.Textbook evaluation is a complex process, which is faced with the problems of evaluation methods and evaluation criteria. In this study, the combination of internal evaluation and external evaluation is employed as the evaluation method, and the New Curriculum Standards is adopted as the evaluation criteria.The research results show that the four sets of English textbooks for junior high school all carry out the spirits of the new curriculum standards, adopt the “topicfunction-structure-task” multiple syllabus design idea, pay attention to the practicality and applicability of language knowledge and language skills, and the elements including emotion and attitude, learning strategies and cultural awareness are all obviously reflected in the four sets of textbooks. In more specific terms, there are many differences among the textbooks, such as the differences in the unit settings, the differences in the quantity and the type of language activities, the differences in the presentation of language knowledge, etc. With the similar overall framework and the homogeneous basic concepts, the four sets of textbooks strive to do the best in some aspects, therefore, each set of textbook has its obvious merits, but also some deficiencies.For the use of the current English textbooks in middle school, the author thinks that teachers should have a correct understanding of textbooks, change the teachers’ positioning, correctly understand the relationship between the teaching and the new curriculum standards, and fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of their textbooks so as to adapt or adjust the textbooks.For the new textbooks development, the author recommends replacing direct presentation of the language rules by practical language activities, arranging the phonetic learning into every unit, making grammar return to the textbooks, combining the methods of indirect reflection and subject learning to cultivate learning strategies,balancing the output of western culture and Chinese culture, and highlighting the characteristics of textbooks, thus truly diversifying English textbooks of middle school in China.This thesis consists of four parts. The first part introduces the research background, the research object, the research content and methods, and the researchsignificance. The second part reviews the domestic and foreign research results about teaching textbooks evaluation methods and standards, and discusses the evaluation methods and evaluation standards of this study. In the third part, based on the new curriculum standards, the author first makes the internal evaluation of the four sets of textbooks from seven aspects, including compiling concepts, design ideas, language skills, language knowledge, emotional attitudes, learning strategies and cultural awareness, by means of text analysis, and then makes the external evaluation from that seven aspects with questionnaire survey. In the last part, the author sums up the similarities and differences among the textbooks as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each one, and puts forward the recommendations of the textbooks use and textbooks development according to the above research.