| General High School English Curriculum Standard puts forward that the purpose of reading skills teaching is to cultivate students' reading strategies and the sense of language,and especially cultivate the ability of acquiring and processing information during the process of reading. Textbooks, which are compiled based on the curriculum standard, are the main material for teaching and learning for teachers and students. And they are also the main basis for the assessment of teaching results and an important foundation for students to broaden their knowledge. To make full use of textbooks, it is necessary to make an in-depth analysis of the textbook for teachers so that they can get fully familiar with the textbook. In recent years, researches on textbooks are mainly focused on vocabulary,sentence, culture and so on, but there is no research on the text types. In order to make up for the deficiency, this research will make a comprehensive analysis of the national compulsory education curriculum standard experimental textbook Advance with English.This research will analyze the genres of the reading passages in the textbooks(TEXTBOOK) and the National Matriculation English Test (Jiangsu) (NMET(Jiangsu)).The stylistic features of the passages will be analyzed from a multi-feature and multi-dimensional perspective with Multi-dimensional analysis proposed by Biber in 1988.Reading part of the textbooks and Reading Comprehension part of NMET (Jiangsu)test papers from 2008 to 2015 are chosen as the corpus to make a comparison between them. Accordingly, this study mainly aims to answer the following questions: (1) What are the genres of the reading passages in English textbooks and NMET (Jiangsu) ? (2) a. What are the differences between the genres of the passages in the two corpora? b. What are the differences between the linguistic features of the passages in the two corpora?The results of the research show that:(1) There are five text types in the two corpora: involved persuasion, imaginative narrative, general narrative exposition, scientific exposition and learned exposition. And general narrative exposition accounts for the highest proportion, which is consistent to the results of Biber's research, which regarded this text types as the most common one.(2) The distributions of these different text types in each corpus are generally consistent except for the learned exposition. Though the ratios of this text type are low in both corpora, NMET has a higher percentage of this text type, which means textbooks cannot provide students with enough instructions to make them have a clear understanding of the linguistic features of this kind text type and distinguish it from other text types. What's more, there is no principle of the distribution of the text types in different grades of the textbooks, which is not good for cultivating the genre awareness of Chinese students.(3) There are seven linguistic features distinctively differing between the two corpora:possibility modals, wh-clauses,word length, and type/token ratio, pied-piping constructions, prediction modals, conditional subordination, etc. These factors may be some obstructions for comprehending a text if students cannot grasp them well enough.According to these questions, this research also gives some proposals on English textbook compilation. In addition, when using the textbooks, teachers should pay attention to cultivating the genre awareness of the students and make them recognize different linguistic features of different dimensions. And teachers should learn to make deep analysis of the textbooks and students acquirement by making full use of the corpus. On the other hand,passages in reading comprehension of examination papers should be selected based on the textbooks, and the distribution of the genres should be more rational. For students,they should expand vocabulary through reading and broaden their horizon,so that they can solve problems existing in reading comprehension more easily. |
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