An Evaluation Of Business English Comprehensive Coursebook

With the rapid development of world economy and prosperity of international trade,English has been the communication bridge among different countries,which brought great opportunity for Business English(BE) to grow.Granted by the Ministry of Education,there have been 251 universities in China offering BA Program of BE until 2015.The development of BE majors highly depends on cultivating plan,teaching syllabus,faculty training,teaching facilities and coursebooks construction etc.The coursebook plays an essential role in the whole teaching process,it could have huge effect on teaching procedure and teaching results.The evaluation to target coursebook aims to assess its usability to improve BE teaching,to better teaching effects,and to provide important reference to select,revise and compile BE coursebook.Comparing the foreign studies,the domestic studies on ESP including BE started much later.However,some domestic scholars have been already in research of BE evaluation in recent years.Selecting BE comprehensive coursebook,namely,Success with BEC(Vantage)(Student's Book 3rd version)as research objects,taking McDonough&Shaw and Hutchinson&Waters' coursebook evaluation studies as theoretical basis,along with the help of Hutchinson&Waters,framework of Needs Analysis,this paper intends to evaluate target BE coursebook currently used by BE undergraduates in a more systematic way including external evaluation,internal evaluation and overall evaluation.130 students in School of Foreign Studies,Yulin Normal University,50 in-service employees in different areas of China were invited to conduct questionnaires in groups;5 BE teachers with at least 2 years of teaching experience were also invited to score the target coursebook and have face-to-face interview with the author.Through these research instrument,data were collected to explore the BE learners' learning needs an targets needs,the employers'needs and BE talent requirement,and feedbacks on current use coursebook from teachers.Major findings of this study are as follow:Based on the criteria in this study,the results of the evaluation indicate the BE coursebook basically satisfied the learners'needs,employees'needs and the cultivating objectives of the Curriculum.The merits include a wide range of topics related to business and highlight of one-skill exercises during external evaluation;it can balance the learner's linguistic competence and the learner's business communication skills during internal evaluation.However,overall evaluation revealed that the target coursebook doesn't attach background information(business knowledge);few integrated exercises;the teaching contents seem a little dispersed;and more supplementary materials can be added in.Based on the above study,the author would like to make some suggestions.First,the scope and quantity of questionnaires about the BE learners' needs and in-service employees'needs should be upgraded,importance of interviews with BE teachers should be attached,more field experts and BE teachers should be invited to give scores for evaluating target coursebook.Hopefully,this study could contribute a little for further revise and development of BE comprehensive coursebooks.