Authenticity Of The Dialogue Materials In Go For It

As the most important English resources for both English language teachers and students in China,the PEP Junior English Textbooks(Go For It)were written by English Curriculum Standard of Compulsory Education.Their writing quality decides,to a great degree,the quality of English teaching in junior middle school.Therefore,studies on this topic have been extensively carried out since their publications,mainly focusing on the teaching based on the textbooks,or analysis and assessment of the 66 textbooks.Yet,studies are neither sufficient on theoretical and compiling principles,nor on linguistic and illustrative problems existing in the textbooks.This paper is a preliminary study on the adequacy of the dialogue materials from the perspective of linguistic authenticity of the dialogue materials in the PEP Junior English textbooks.To be exact,the relevance and nativeness of the dialogue materials are examined to see if there is space to improve the quality of the set of textbooks.The nativeness of the dialogue materials including sentence structures,dictions and contents,is analyzed by means of comparison using parallel corpus and discourse analysis.The data reveals that from the Textbook I of Grade Seven to the textbook of the Grade Nine,the percentage of the beginnings of the authentic materials is respectively: 100%(Textbook I of Grade Seven),66.7%(Textbook II of Grade Seven),100%(Textbook I of Grade Eight),60%(Textbook II of Grade Eight)and 64.3%(Grade Nine).The percentage of the adjacent pairs is respectively 95.7%(Textbook I of Grade Seven),90.5%(Textbook II of Grade Seven),91.4%(Textbook I of Grade Eight),84.4%(Textbook II of Grade Eight)and 91.5%(Grade Nine).Totally speaking,the percentage of the authenticity of beginnings and adjacent pairs is respectively: 76.4% and 91.1%.In addition,the percentage of authentic contents in topics and dictions is 88.9%.so the result reveals that there are still not perfect in the nativeness.The relevance of the dialogue materials is studied by referring to the topics in the famous western magazines like The Guardian and New Yorker,to find the frequency of those topics in daily life,so as to prove their relations to the students' cognitive experience,and result shows that the percentage of the authentic topics adds up to 95.5%.Basing on the result of the studies,the paper concludes that the majority of the dialogue materials in the textbooks are adequate in the sense of nativeness and relevance.But it should not be denied that there is still space for further improvement in the choice of language materials,so when teachers are using the textbooks,they should be careful,while fully making use of the textbooks as a convenience,they should implement more authentic materials by referring to native newspapers or films,and other media materials as much as possible,textbook compilers are suggested to introduce the corpus into the process of textbooks writing,students should read more authentic materials and school leaders should actively organize teachers to build school based curriculum.