An Evaluation Of New Standard English In Use

English textbook is the media of English teaching,and is the central component of the practice of English curriculum and the guidance of activity design.In addition,it assures a measure of structures,consistency,and logical progression in a class,and affects the teaching quality directly.Therefore,much has been done for the evaluations of English textbooks so far,which has made outstanding contributions to the improvement of English teaching and learning and of English textbook edition.However,up to the present,little has been done for contrastive evaluations of NSE in use in rural and urban primary schools.The present research intends to conduct an evaluation of NSE(New Standard English)published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in use in rural and urban primary school based on NECS(New English Curriculum Standard)by adopting questionnaires and interviews,and analysis of NSE in an attempt to find out in what aspects NSE meets or does not meet the requirements of NECS and the needs of rural and urban teachers and students.Participants in this study are 150 students and 20 teachers respectively from rural and urban schools in Zhucheng City,totaling 300 students and 40 teachers.Findings show that both urban and rural teachers hold that NSE can basically implement the regulations of NECS,and the urban teachers think that NSE can basically meet the needs of teaching and learning,but in comparison the rural teachers are not so satisfied in more aspects.Some more concrete results are presented in the following:1)About half of the urban teachers and over half of the rural teachers are not satisfied with the design of pronunciation.2)About half of the urban teachers and students and most of the rural teachers and students say the amount of new words are too large.3)The arrangement of grammar points does not conform to the principle of gradual improvement,and both rural and urban students think it is tough to master them.4)There are not enough introductions to Chinese culture and cultural differences between Eastern and Western cultures.In terms of the above shortcomings in NSE,the following suggestions are made.1)More should be added to phonetics such as phonetic symbols with more illustrations to satisfy students’ cognitive characteristics of visualization and concreteness and rules about accent,intonation,and stress for even most rural teachers themselves do not know them.2)New words in the first two books should be reduced since too many of them are likely to weaken students’ interest and confidence in learning English.3)Grammar points should be presented more often in latter models.4)More about cultures especially the differences between Eastern and Western cultures should be added.No textbook is perfect,so is NSE.Teachers are advised to know clearly the merits and demerits of NSE and their students in order to make full use of it.