A Student-Based Evaluation Of Topic Content In New Senior English For China

Language materials are very important sources for students to learn language knowledge and develop their language skills.High level and high quality teaching materials play a very positive role for teachers and students,and teaching process and teaching effectiveness.There is no doubt that the teaching materials play a very crucial role in English teaching.With "One guideline and many textbooks available" policy and the gradually open material market,more and more textbooks will be available to choose from.In order to take advantages of the teaching materials,the evaluation and analysis of the teaching materials is essential.This paper takes the New Senior English for China as an example to explore the topic content from perspectives of firstly the variety and range of topics,secondly the connection level with the target students' life,and lastly the topic interest for students,by means of content analysis and questionnaire survey.In this study,the author first adapt the previous topic classification framework,the actual situation of the textbooks,and the topic categories issued in New Senior English Standards by the Education Ministry to a new topic category framework for the study.This topic classification table contains 18 topic groups,and each topic group can contain a number of sub topics.On the basis of this,174 reading articles in New Senior English for China are identified.The results of the identification show the variety and range of topics in the textbooks.After that,a questionnaire containing those 18 topic groups are compiled with each group providing example topics from the textbooks.Then two classes of senior students are investigated on their perceptions of the connection with life and interest level of those 18 topic groups.Finally,through the analysis of the data from the questionnaire,combining the frequency of each topic group,the evaluation of the topics in connecting with thestudents and being interesting is available.The study finds out that though the textbook contains a large variety and range of topics,it still leaves out some important topic groups and covers not enough instances for some groups.Consequently,the distribution of each topic group is not balanced,with some group having abundant instances while some of them containing few ones.What's more,the study demonstrates that much more global-related topics is included than local-related topics.Analysis of the date obtained from the questionnaire shows that the textbook contains a moderate number of topics in connecting with the students' life.This could be caused by the heavy inclusion of topics about ‘literature and art',‘famous people',‘nature' and‘places and travel',which are on one hand relatively not so close to students' life while have a high frequency in the textbooks.The study also finds out that the textbook contains moderately sufficient topics of interest to the students.The results show that students tend to like topics about ‘literature and art',‘culture',‘health' and‘places and travel' while on the contrary perceive topics about ‘famous people',‘science and technology' and ‘society' not so interesting.And topics about ‘famous people' are highly problematic for its high frequency and low interest.Lastly,the study reveals that ‘culture',‘health',‘money',‘relationships' and ‘extra-curricular'are both close to students' life and interesting for them.The evaluation of topic content in New Senor English for China gives useful information both for English teachers and textbook compilers.Firstly,it helps the teachers to make adjustments of the teaching material by adding or cutting certain content so as to make sure of a rich coverage of language input for various topics.Secondly,it provides suggestions in topic selection for textbook compilers that more topics that are both close to students' life and interesting should be contained in.