The Comparative Study On New Senior English For China And Advance With English

As one of a significant source of language input, English textbooks contribute to providing students with plenty of drills and communicative activities, cultivating students’ learning strategies and developing comprehensive language skills. Therefore, textbooks play an important role in English teaching. Since new National Curriculum Standards were issued by the Education Ministry in 2001, a fresh situation has been opened that subordinate educational authorities have autonomous rights to choose textbooks. On one hand, subordinate educational authorities get access to selecting suitable textbooks according to local students’ levels. On the other hand, a certain textbook cannot meet all students’ requirements. What’s more, numerous teachers seldom play a part in teaching creativity but rely heavily on textbooks. Therefore, it is of a great significance to evaluate the textbook in a systematical way and find out its strengths and weaknesses of it so that teachers can make a better use of it.Choosing New Senior English for China(NSEFC) and Advance with English as study object, this thesis uses an evaluating model including internal analysis and external evaluation. Internal analysis focuses on guiding ideologies, language knowledge and language skills, to make a comparative study between them. For external analysis, questionnaire will be carried out among teachers. The research attempts to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of two sets of textbooks in a scientific and overall way so as to help teachers make a better use of two set of textbook after understanding the strengths and weaknesses of them and make some recommendations for textbook editors.The evaluation in this study mainly attempts to answer the following two research questions:1) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the two sets of textbooks?2) What are teachers’ comments on these two sets of textbooks?National Curriculum Standards and Cunningsworth’s criteria provide the dominant principles to evaluate NSEFC and Advance with English. The study employs a questionnaire as the instrument on the basis of questionnaire designed by professor He Anping.To conclude, after an overall evaluating and analyzing on NSEFC and Advance with English, this study finds that two sets of textbooks have their own strengths and weaknesses and can basically meet the requirements stipulated by National English Curriculum Standards on textbook compiling principles and the aspects of language skills, language knowledge, moral attitude, learning strategies and cultural awareness.